2,589 research outputs found
A Novel Method for the Absolute Pose Problem with Pairwise Constraints
Absolute pose estimation is a fundamental problem in computer vision, and it
is a typical parameter estimation problem, meaning that efforts to solve it
will always suffer from outlier-contaminated data. Conventionally, for a fixed
dimensionality d and the number of measurements N, a robust estimation problem
cannot be solved faster than O(N^d). Furthermore, it is almost impossible to
remove d from the exponent of the runtime of a globally optimal algorithm.
However, absolute pose estimation is a geometric parameter estimation problem,
and thus has special constraints. In this paper, we consider pairwise
constraints and propose a globally optimal algorithm for solving the absolute
pose estimation problem. The proposed algorithm has a linear complexity in the
number of correspondences at a given outlier ratio. Concretely, we first
decouple the rotation and the translation subproblems by utilizing the pairwise
constraints, and then we solve the rotation subproblem using the
branch-and-bound algorithm. Lastly, we estimate the translation based on the
known rotation by using another branch-and-bound algorithm. The advantages of
our method are demonstrated via thorough testing on both synthetic and
real-world dataComment: 10 pages, 7figure
Robust and Optimal Methods for Geometric Sensor Data Alignment
Geometric sensor data alignment - the problem of finding the
rigid transformation that correctly aligns two sets of sensor
data without prior knowledge of how the data correspond - is a
fundamental task in computer vision and robotics. It is
inconvenient then that outliers and non-convexity are inherent to
the problem and present significant challenges for alignment
algorithms. Outliers are highly prevalent in sets of sensor data,
particularly when the sets overlap incompletely. Despite this,
many alignment objective functions are not robust to outliers,
leading to erroneous alignments. In addition, alignment problems
are highly non-convex, a property arising from the objective
function and the transformation. While finding a local optimum
may not be difficult, finding the global optimum is a hard
optimisation problem. These key challenges have not been fully
and jointly resolved in the existing literature, and so there is
a need for robust and optimal solutions to alignment problems.
Hence the objective of this thesis is to develop tractable
algorithms for geometric sensor data alignment that are robust to
outliers and not susceptible to spurious local optima.
This thesis makes several significant contributions to the
geometric alignment literature, founded on new insights into
robust alignment and the geometry of transformations. Firstly, a
novel discriminative sensor data representation is proposed that
has better viewpoint invariance than generative models and is
time and memory efficient without sacrificing model fidelity.
Secondly, a novel local optimisation algorithm is developed for
nD-nD geometric alignment under a robust distance measure. It
manifests a wider region of convergence and a greater robustness
to outliers and sampling artefacts than other local optimisation
algorithms. Thirdly, the first optimal solution for 3D-3D
geometric alignment with an inherently robust objective function
is proposed. It outperforms other geometric alignment algorithms
on challenging datasets due to its guaranteed optimality and
outlier robustness, and has an efficient parallel implementation.
Fourthly, the first optimal solution for 2D-3D geometric
alignment with an inherently robust objective function is
proposed. It outperforms existing approaches on challenging
datasets, reliably finding the global optimum, and has an
efficient parallel implementation. Finally, another optimal
solution is developed for 2D-3D geometric alignment, using a
robust surface alignment measure.
Ultimately, robust and optimal methods, such as those in this
thesis, are necessary to reliably find accurate solutions to
geometric sensor data alignment problems
Consensus Maximization: Theoretical Analysis and New Algorithms
The core of many computer vision systems is model fitting, which estimates a particular mathematical model given a set of input data. Due to the imperfection of the sensors, pre-processing steps and/or model assumptions, computer vision data usually contains outliers, which are abnormally distributed data points that can heavily reduce the accuracy of conventional model fitting methods. Robust fitting aims to make model fitting insensitive to outliers. Consensus maximization is one of the most popular paradigms for robust fitting, which is the main research subject of this thesis. Mathematically, consensus maximization is an optimization problem. To understand the theoretical hardness of this problem, a thorough analysis about its computational complexity is first conducted. Motivated by the theoretical analysis, novel techniques that improve different types of algorithms are then introduced. On one hand, an efficient and deterministic optimization approach is proposed. Unlike previous deterministic approaches, the proposed one does not rely on the relaxation of the original optimization problem. This property makes it much more effective at refining an initial solution. On the other hand, several techniques are proposed to significantly accelerate consensus maximization tree search. Tree search is one of the most efficient global optimization approaches for consensus maximization. Hence, the proposed techniques greatly improve the practicality of globally optimal consensus maximization algorithms. Finally, a consensus-maximization-based method is proposed to register terrestrial LiDAR point clouds. It demonstrates how to surpass the general theoretical hardness by using special problem structure (the rotation axis returned by the sensors), which simplify the problem and lead to application-oriented algorithms that are both efficient and globally optimal.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 202
Accelerating Globally Optimal Consensus Maximization in Geometric Vision
Branch-and-bound-based consensus maximization stands out due to its important
ability of retrieving the globally optimal solution to outlier-affected
geometric problems. However, while the discovery of such solutions caries high
scientific value, its application in practical scenarios is often prohibited by
its computational complexity growing exponentially as a function of the
dimensionality of the problem at hand. In this work, we convey a novel, general
technique that allows us to branch over an dimensional space for an
n-dimensional problem. The remaining degree of freedom can be solved globally
optimally within each bound calculation by applying the efficient interval
stabbing technique. While each individual bound derivation is harder to compute
owing to the additional need for solving a sorting problem, the reduced number
of intervals and tighter bounds in practice lead to a significant reduction in
the overall number of required iterations. Besides an abstract introduction of
the approach, we present applications to three fundamental geometric computer
vision problems: camera resectioning, relative camera pose estimation, and
point set registration. Through our exhaustive tests, we demonstrate
significant speed-up factors at times exceeding two orders of magnitude,
thereby increasing the viability of globally optimal consensus maximizers in
online application scenarios
Unsupervised Learning for Robust Fitting:A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Robust model fitting is a core algorithm in a large number of computer vision
applications. Solving this problem efficiently for datasets highly contaminated
with outliers is, however, still challenging due to the underlying
computational complexity. Recent literature has focused on learning-based
algorithms. However, most approaches are supervised which require a large
amount of labelled training data. In this paper, we introduce a novel
unsupervised learning framework that learns to directly solve robust model
fitting. Unlike other methods, our work is agnostic to the underlying input
features, and can be easily generalized to a wide variety of LP-type problems
with quasi-convex residuals. We empirically show that our method outperforms
existing unsupervised learning approaches, and achieves competitive results
compared to traditional methods on several important computer vision problems.Comment: The preprint of paper accepted to CVPR 202
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