Demystifying Unsupervised Semantic Correspondence Estimation

We explore semantic correspondence estimation through the lens of unsupervised learning. We thoroughly evaluate several recently proposed unsupervised methods across multiple challenging datasets using a standardized evaluation protocol where we vary factors such as the backbone architecture, the pre-training strategy, and the pre-training and finetuning datasets. To better understand the failure modes of these methods, and in order to provide a clearer path for improvement, we provide a new diagnostic framework along with a new performance metric that is better suited to the semantic matching task. Finally, we introduce a new unsupervised correspondence approach which utilizes the strength of pre-trained features while encouraging better matches during training. This results in significantly better matching performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods.