CLIDD: Cross-Layer Independent Deformable Description for Efficient and Discriminative Local Feature Representation

Abstract

Robust local feature representations are essential for spatial intelligence tasks such as robot navigation and augmented reality. Establishing reliable correspondences requires descriptors that provide both high discriminative power and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce Cross-Layer Independent Deformable Description (CLIDD), a method that achieves superior discriminability by sampling directly from independent feature hierarchies. This approach utilizes learnable offsets to capture fine-grained structural details across scales, without ever constructing a unified dense feature map, eliminating the memory and computation overhead of building a full-scale representation for a sparse sampling process. The per-keypoint per-layer offsets further break interpolation-induced correlation, preserving descriptor discriminability even at high keypoint densities. To ensure real-time performance, we implement a hardware-aware kernel fusion strategy that maximizes inference throughput. Furthermore, we develop a scalable framework that integrates lightweight architectures with a training protocol leveraging both metric learning and knowledge distillation. This scheme generates a wide spectrum of model variants optimized for diverse deployment constraints. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves superior matching accuracy and exceptional computational efficiency simultaneously. Furthermore, our high-performance configuration outperforms a broad range of current state-of-the-art methods while exceeding 200 FPS on edge devices. These results demonstrate that CLIDD delivers high-precision local feature matching with minimal computational overhead, providing a robust and scalable solution for real-time spatial intelligence tasks.