Incremental RANSAC for Online Relocation in Large Dynamic Environments

Vehicle relocation is the problem in which a mobile robot has to estimate the self-position with respect to an a priori map of landmarks using the perception and the motion measurements without using any knowledge of the initial self-position. Recently, RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC), a robust multi-hypothesis estimator, has been successfully applied to offline relocation in static environments. On the other hand, online relocation in dynamic environments is still a difficult problem, for available computation time is always limited, and for measurement include many outliers. To realize real time algorithm for such an online process, we have developed an incremental version of RANSAC algorithm by extending an efficient preemption RANSAC scheme. This novel scheme named incremental RANSAC is able to find inlier hypotheses of self-positions out of large number of outlier hypotheses contaminated by outlier measurements.Comment: Offprint of ICRA2006 pape

Novel Adaptive Genetic Algorithm Sample Consensus

Random sample consensus (RANSAC) is a successful algorithm in model fitting applications. It is vital to have strong exploration phase when there are an enormous amount of outliers within the dataset. Achieving a proper model is guaranteed by pure exploration strategy of RANSAC. However, finding the optimum result requires exploitation. GASAC is an evolutionary paradigm to add exploitation capability to the algorithm. Although GASAC improves the results of RANSAC, it has a fixed strategy for balancing between exploration and exploitation. In this paper, a new paradigm is proposed based on genetic algorithm with an adaptive strategy. We utilize an adaptive genetic operator to select high fitness individuals as parents and mutate low fitness ones. In the mutation phase, a training method is used to gradually learn which gene is the best replacement for the mutated gene. The proposed method adaptively balance between exploration and exploitation by learning about genes. During the final Iterations, the algorithm draws on this information to improve the final results. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on two set of experiments. In all tests, our method outperformed the other methods in terms of both the number of inliers found and the speed of the algorithm

ROBIN: a Graph-Theoretic Approach to Reject Outliers in Robust Estimation using Invariants

Many estimation problems in robotics, computer vision, and learning require estimating unknown quantities in the face of outliers. Outliers are typically the result of incorrect data association or feature matching, and it is common to have problems where more than 90% of the measurements used for estimation are outliers. While current approaches for robust estimation are able to deal with moderate amounts of outliers, they fail to produce accurate estimates in the presence of many outliers. This paper develops an approach to prune outliers. First, we develop a theory of invariance that allows us to quickly check if a subset of measurements are mutually compatible without explicitly solving the estimation problem. Second, we develop a graph-theoretic framework, where measurements are modeled as vertices and mutual compatibility is captured by edges. We generalize existing results showing that the inliers form a clique in this graph and typically belong to the maximum clique. We also show that in practice the maximum k-core of the compatibility graph provides an approximation of the maximum clique, while being faster to compute in large problems. These two contributions leads to ROBIN, our approach to Reject Outliers Based on INvariants, which allows us to quickly prune outliers in generic estimation problems. We demonstrate ROBIN in four geometric perception problems and show it boosts robustness of existing solvers while running in milliseconds in large problems