3,172 research outputs found
New algorithmic developments in maximum consensus robust fitting
In many computer vision applications, the task of robustly estimating the set of parameters of
a geometric model is a fundamental problem. Despite the longstanding research efforts on robust
model fitting, there remains significant scope for investigation. For a large number of geometric
estimation tasks in computer vision, maximum consensus is the most popular robust fitting
criterion. This thesis makes several contributions in the algorithms for consensus maximization.
Randomized hypothesize-and-verify algorithms are arguably the most widely used class of
techniques for robust estimation thanks to their simplicity. Though efficient, these randomized
heuristic methods do not guarantee finding good maximum consensus estimates. To improve the
randomize algorithms, guided sampling approaches have been developed. These methods take
advantage of additional domain information, such as descriptor matching scores, to guide the
sampling process. Subsets of the data that are more likely to result in good estimates are prioritized
for consideration. However, these guided sampling approaches are ineffective when good
domain information is not available. This thesis tackles this shortcoming by proposing a new
guided sampling algorithm, which is based on the class of LP-type problems and Monte Carlo
Tree Search (MCTS). The proposed algorithm relies on a fundamental geometric arrangement
of the data to guide the sampling process. Specifically, we take advantage of the underlying tree
structure of the maximum consensus problem and apply MCTS to efficiently search the tree.
Empirical results show that the new guided sampling strategy outperforms traditional randomized
methods.
Consensus maximization also plays a key role in robust point set registration. A special case
is the registration of deformable shapes. If the surfaces have the same intrinsic shapes, their
deformations can be described accurately by a conformal model. The uniformization theorem
allows the shapes to be conformally mapped onto a canonical domain, wherein the shapes can be
aligned using a M¨obius transformation. The problem of correspondence-free M¨obius alignment
of two sets of noisy and partially overlapping point sets can be tackled as a maximum consensus
problem. Solving for the M¨obius transformation can be approached by randomized voting-type
methods which offers no guarantee of optimality. Local methods such as Iterative Closest Point
can be applied, but with the assumption that a good initialization is given or these techniques
may converge to a bad local minima. When a globally optimal solution is required, the literature
has so far considered only brute-force search. This thesis contributes a new branch-and-bound
algorithm that solves for the globally optimal M¨obius transformation much more efficiently.
So far, the consensus maximization problems are approached mainly by randomized algorithms,
which are efficient but offer no analytical convergence guarantee. On the other hand,
there exist exact algorithms that can solve the problem up to global optimality. The global methods,
however, are intractable in general due to the NP-hardness of the consensus maximization. To fill the gap between the two extremes, this thesis contributes two novel deterministic algorithms
to approximately optimize the maximum consensus criterion. The first method is based
on non-smooth penalization supported by a Frank-Wolfe-style optimization scheme, and another
algorithm is based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Both of the
proposed methods are capable of handling the non-linear geometric residuals commonly used in
computer vision. As will be demonstrated, our proposed methods consistently outperform other
heuristics and approximate methods.Thesis (Ph.D.) (Research by Publication) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201
On the Convergence of Alternating Direction Lagrangian Methods for Nonconvex Structured Optimization Problems
Nonconvex and structured optimization problems arise in many engineering
applications that demand scalable and distributed solution methods. The study
of the convergence properties of these methods is in general difficult due to
the nonconvexity of the problem. In this paper, two distributed solution
methods that combine the fast convergence properties of augmented
Lagrangian-based methods with the separability properties of alternating
optimization are investigated. The first method is adapted from the classic
quadratic penalty function method and is called the Alternating Direction
Penalty Method (ADPM). Unlike the original quadratic penalty function method,
in which single-step optimizations are adopted, ADPM uses an alternating
optimization, which in turn makes it scalable. The second method is the
well-known Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). It is shown that
ADPM for nonconvex problems asymptotically converges to a primal feasible point
under mild conditions and an additional condition ensuring that it
asymptotically reaches the standard first order necessary conditions for local
optimality are introduced. In the case of the ADMM, novel sufficient conditions
under which the algorithm asymptotically reaches the standard first order
necessary conditions are established. Based on this, complete convergence of
ADMM for a class of low dimensional problems are characterized. Finally, the
results are illustrated by applying ADPM and ADMM to a nonconvex localization
problem in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure
Distributed Coupled Multi-Agent Stochastic Optimization
This work develops effective distributed strategies for the solution of
constrained multi-agent stochastic optimization problems with coupled
parameters across the agents. In this formulation, each agent is influenced by
only a subset of the entries of a global parameter vector or model, and is
subject to convex constraints that are only known locally. Problems of this
type arise in several applications, most notably in disease propagation models,
minimum-cost flow problems, distributed control formulations, and distributed
power system monitoring. This work focuses on stochastic settings, where a
stochastic risk function is associated with each agent and the objective is to
seek the minimizer of the aggregate sum of all risks subject to a set of
constraints. Agents are not aware of the statistical distribution of the data
and, therefore, can only rely on stochastic approximations in their learning
strategies. We derive an effective distributed learning strategy that is able
to track drifts in the underlying parameter model. A detailed performance and
stability analysis is carried out showing that the resulting coupled diffusion
strategy converges at a linear rate to an neighborhood of the true
penalized optimizer
In-network Sparsity-regularized Rank Minimization: Algorithms and Applications
Given a limited number of entries from the superposition of a low-rank matrix
plus the product of a known fat compression matrix times a sparse matrix,
recovery of the low-rank and sparse components is a fundamental task subsuming
compressed sensing, matrix completion, and principal components pursuit. This
paper develops algorithms for distributed sparsity-regularized rank
minimization over networks, when the nuclear- and -norm are used as
surrogates to the rank and nonzero entry counts of the sought matrices,
respectively. While nuclear-norm minimization has well-documented merits when
centralized processing is viable, non-separability of the singular-value sum
challenges its distributed minimization. To overcome this limitation, an
alternative characterization of the nuclear norm is adopted which leads to a
separable, yet non-convex cost minimized via the alternating-direction method
of multipliers. The novel distributed iterations entail reduced-complexity
per-node tasks, and affordable message passing among single-hop neighbors.
Interestingly, upon convergence the distributed (non-convex) estimator provably
attains the global optimum of its centralized counterpart, regardless of
initialization. Several application domains are outlined to highlight the
generality and impact of the proposed framework. These include unveiling
traffic anomalies in backbone networks, predicting networkwide path latencies,
and mapping the RF ambiance using wireless cognitive radios. Simulations with
synthetic and real network data corroborate the convergence of the novel
distributed algorithm, and its centralized performance guarantees.Comment: 30 pages, submitted for publication on the IEEE Trans. Signal Proces
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