Auto-regressive transformation for image alignment

Existing methods for image alignment struggle in cases involving feature-sparse regions, extreme scale and field-of-view differences, and large deformations, often resulting in suboptimal accuracy. Robustness to these challenges improves through iterative refinement of the transformation field while focusing on critical regions in multi-scale image representations. We thus propose Auto-Regressive Transformation (ART), a novel method that iteratively estimates the coarse-to-fine transformations within an auto-regressive framework. Leveraging hierarchical multi-scale features, our network refines the transformations using randomly sampled points at each scale. By incorporating guidance from the cross-attention layer, the model focuses on critical regions, ensuring accurate alignment even in challenging, feature-limited conditions. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that ART significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, establishing it as a powerful new method for precise image alignment with broad applicability.

@article{lee2025_2505.04864,
  title={ Auto-regressive transformation for image alignment },
  author={ Kanggeon Lee and Soochahn Lee and Kyoung Mu Lee },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.04864},
  year={ 2025 }
}