Sony Kaggle Club wins gold in Image Matching Challenge

Members of Sony Group’s “Kaggle Club” placed 10th out of 943 teams at the recent Image Matching Challenge 2025 <https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/gVvNai3H>, earning a gold medal. The “Kaggle Club” is a community of volunteer engineers within Sony Group who participate in competitions. Kaggle is an AI competition platform with over 24 million registered users as of June 2025. Companies and research institutions provide datasets for competitions, and participants who rank highly are awarded prizes and titles. This competition challenges participants to group unorganized image collections—comprising visually similar but distinct scenes—into correct scene-based clusters, and then reconstruct each cluster as an independent, high-precision 3D model. A key difficulty arises when images from different scenes or noisy images are mistakenly mixed in during 3D reconstruction: feature-point matching consistency breaks down, causing the reconstruction to fail. To address this, the team introduced an original similarity-scoring method based on feature-point matching results between image pairs, focusing on local geometric consistency. This allowed us to accurately extract spatially adjacent image pairs even among visually hard-to-distinguish sets. Details of our solution are available here <https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/gw3yfbUn>. Members’ Comment: “We are very pleased to have secured 10th place. Volunteers from across different divisions of the Kaggle Club came together to take on this challenge. Through frequent discussions and repeated trial and error, we were able to develop a high-quality solution. We feel our team has grown, and we are convinced that the knowledge and skills we gained will greatly benefit our future work and projects. We look forward to continuing our challenges as we aim even higher.” Ryosuke Saito, Tomoya Okazaki, Takeru Endo, suguru kobayashi #Kaggle #Sony