RIPE: Reinforcement Learning on Unlabeled Image Pairs for Robust Keypoint Extraction

We introduce RIPE, an innovative reinforcement learning-based framework for weakly-supervised training of a keypoint extractor that excels in both detection and description tasks. In contrast to conventional training regimes that depend heavily on artificial transformations, pre-generated models, or 3D data, RIPE requires only a binary label indicating whether paired images represent the same scene.This minimal supervision significantly expands the pool of training data, enabling the creation of a highly generalized and robust keypoint extractor. RIPE utilizes the encoder's intermediate layers for the description of the keypoints with a hyper-column approach to integrate information from different scales. Additionally, we propose a auxiliary loss to enhance the discriminative capability of the learned descriptors.Comprehensive evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that RIPE simplifies data preparation while achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, marking a significant advancement in robust keypoint extraction and description.Code and data will be made available for research purposes.