WovenAnchor Matcher: Specialized Intra- and Inter-Image Context Modeling for Feature Matching
Semi-dense local feature matching commonly aggregates contextual information before coarse-to-fine correspondence estimation. However, intra-image and inter-image aggregation serve different roles: the former should propagate spatial evidence within each image while retaining structured two-dimensional dependencies, whereas the latter should gather information from plausible corresponding regions while limiting noise from unrelated locations. We propose WovenAnchor Matcher (WAM), a semi-dense matching framework based on role-specialized context aggregation. WAM introduces two complementary operators. WovenMamba performs intra-image aggregation through horizontal-then-vertical state-space propagation, allowing vertical updates to operate on horizontally contextualized features and thereby encouraging a structured two-dimensional receptive-field bias. AnchorCrossAttention performs inter-image aggregation by using cross-attention to gather context from plausible corresponding regions across the image pair. It performs this exchange over local representative anchors that aggregate feature evidence within each window. On MegaDepth, WAM achieves 66.1 pose AUC@5$^\circ$, improving on the JamMa baseline by 2.0 AUC points under the same evaluation setup. Ablations show that removing or replacing either specialized component reduces accuracy, providing evidence that intra-image propagation and inter-image retrieval benefit from role-specific aggregation designs. Code and pretrained weights are available at https://github.com/mmaiLab/WovenAnchorMatcher.