Towards Complementary Keypoint Detection via Mixture of Detectors

Keypoint detection plays a central role in geometric vision pipelines. Existing detectors exhibit complementary strengths across different scene structures and keypoint budgets, and reliance on a single detector often results in suboptimal keypoint distributions. Motivated by this observation, we propose Mixture of Detectors (MoD) for dense matching pipelines, a unified framework for complementary keypoint detection through the adaptive composition of heterogeneous detectors. MoD first distills heterogeneous detectors into a unified model, allowing diverse detection maps to be predicted efficiently within a single forward pass. Detector selection is subsequently formulated as a patch-wise, budget-conditioned decision process, in which a lightweight router assigns the most suitable detector to each local region. To avoid heuristic supervision, the router is trained with task-driven rewards derived from downstream matching quality, jointly capturing both keypoint quantity and precision. Extensive experiments on MegaDepth, ScanNet, and HPatches demonstrate that MoD consistently outperforms strong baselines across a wide range of keypoint budgets, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving keypoint distribution and downstream geometric performance.