CONTRIBUTING.md

Thanks for your interest in contributing to IMM!

To add a new method:

1. Create a new file in the matching folder called [method.py]
2. If the method requires external modules, add them to ./third_party with git submodule add: for example, I've used this command to add the LightGlue module which is automatically downloaded when using --recursive

git submodule add https://github.com/cvg/LightGlue third_party/LightGlue

This command automatically modifies .gitmodules (and modifying it manually doesn't work).

3. Add the method by subclassing BaseMatcher and implementing _forward, which takes two image tensors as input and returns a dict with keys ['num_inliers','H', 'mkpts0', 'mkpts1', 'inliers0', 'inliers1', 'kpts0', 'kpts1', 'desc0', desc1']. The value of any key may be 0, if that model does not produce that output, but they key must exist.
   
   You may also want to implement preprocess, download_weights, and anything else necessary to make the model easy to run.

4. Open __init__.py and add the model name (all lowercase) to the available_models list.
   
   Add an elif case to get_matcher() with this model name, following the template from the other matchers.

5. Format the code with Black, like this

pip3 install black
cd image-matching-models && black --line-length 120 ./

6. Test your model and submit a PR!

Note: as authors update their model repos, consider updating the submodule reference here using the below: To update a submodule to the head of the remote, run

git submodule update --remote third_party/[submodule_name]