Space-Partitioning RANSAC

A new algorithm is proposed to accelerate RANSAC model quality calculations. The method is based on partitioning the joint correspondence space, e.g., 2D-2D point correspondences, into a pair of regular grids. The grid cells are mapped by minimal sample models, estimated within RANSAC, to reject correspondences that are inconsistent with the model parameters early. The proposed technique is general. It works with arbitrary transformations even if a point is mapped to a point set, e.g., as a fundamental matrix maps to epipolar lines. The method is tested on thousands of image pairs from publicly available datasets on fundamental and essential matrix, homography and radially distorted homography estimation. On average, it reduces the RANSAC run-time by 41% with provably no deterioration in the accuracy. It can be straightforwardly plugged into state-of-the-art RANSAC frameworks, e.g. VSAC

Deep MAGSAC++

We propose Deep MAGSAC++ combining the advantages of traditional and deep robust estimators. We introduce a novel loss function that exploits the orientation and scale from partially affine covariant features, e.g., SIFT, in a geometrically justifiable manner. The new loss helps in learning higher-order information about the underlying scene geometry. Moreover, we propose a new sampler for RANSAC that always selects the sample with the highest probability of consisting only of inliers. After every unsuccessful iteration, the probabilities are updated in a principled way via a Bayesian approach. The prediction of the deep network is exploited as prior inside the sampler. Benefiting from the new loss, the proposed sampler and a number of technical advancements, Deep MAGSAC++ is superior to the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and run-time on thousands of image pairs from publicly available real-world datasets for essential and fundamental matrix estimation

DGC-GNN: Descriptor-free Geometric-Color Graph Neural Network for 2D-3D Matching

Direct matching of 2D keypoints in an input image to a 3D point cloud of the scene without requiring visual descriptors has garnered increased interest due to its lower memory requirements, inherent privacy preservation, and reduced need for expensive 3D model maintenance compared to visual descriptor-based methods. However, existing algorithms often compromise on performance, resulting in a significant deterioration compared to their descriptor-based counterparts. In this paper, we introduce DGC-GNN, a novel algorithm that employs a global-to-local Graph Neural Network (GNN) that progressively exploits geometric and color cues to represent keypoints, thereby improving matching robustness. Our global-to-local procedure encodes both Euclidean and angular relations at a coarse level, forming the geometric embedding to guide the local point matching. We evaluate DGC-GNN on both indoor and outdoor datasets, demonstrating that it not only doubles the accuracy of the state-of-the-art descriptor-free algorithm but, also, substantially narrows the performance gap between descriptor-based and descriptor-free methods. The code and trained models will be made publicly available

Volumetric Semantically Consistent 3D Panoptic Mapping

We introduce an online 2D-to-3D semantic instance mapping algorithm aimed at generating comprehensive, accurate, and efficient semantic 3D maps suitable for autonomous agents in unstructured environments. The proposed approach is based on a Voxel-TSDF representation used in recent algorithms. It introduces novel ways of integrating semantic prediction confidence during mapping, producing semantic and instance-consistent 3D regions. Further improvements are achieved by graph optimization-based semantic labeling and instance refinement. The proposed method achieves accuracy superior to the state of the art on public large-scale datasets, improving on a number of widely used metrics. We also highlight a downfall in the evaluation of recent studies: using the ground truth trajectory as input instead of a SLAM-estimated one substantially affects the accuracy, creating a large gap between the reported results and the actual performance on real-world data.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Fully Differentiable RANSAC

We propose the fully differentiable $\nabla$-RANSAC.It predicts the inlier probabilities of the input data points, exploits the predictions in a guided sampler, and estimates the model parameters (e.g., fundamental matrix) and its quality while propagating the gradients through the entire procedure. The random sampler in $\nabla$-RANSAC is based on a clever re-parametrization strategy, i.e.\ the Gumbel Softmax sampler, that allows propagating the gradients directly into the subsequent differentiable minimal solver. The model quality function marginalizes over the scores from all models estimated within $\nabla$-RANSAC to guide the network learning accurate and useful probabilities.$\nabla$-RANSAC is the first to unlock the end-to-end training of geometric estimation pipelines, containing feature detection, matching and RANSAC-like randomized robust estimation. As a proof of its potential, we train $\nabla$-RANSAC together with LoFTR, i.e. a recent detector-free feature matcher, to find reliable correspondences in an end-to-end manner. We test $\nabla$-RANSAC on a number of real-world datasets on fundamental and essential matrix estimation. It is superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy while being among the fastest methods. The code and trained models will be made public

Q-REG: End-to-End Trainable Point Cloud Registration with Surface Curvature

Point cloud registration has seen recent success with several learning-based methods that focus on correspondence matching and, as such, optimize only for this objective. Following the learning step of correspondence matching, they evaluate the estimated rigid transformation with a RANSAC-like framework. While it is an indispensable component of these methods, it prevents a fully end-to-end training, leaving the objective to minimize the pose error nonserved. We present a novel solution, Q-REG, which utilizes rich geometric information to estimate the rigid pose from a single correspondence. Q-REG allows to formalize the robust estimation as an exhaustive search, hence enabling end-to-end training that optimizes over both objectives of correspondence matching and rigid pose estimation. We demonstrate in the experiments that Q-REG is agnostic to the correspondence matching method and provides consistent improvement both when used only in inference and in end-to-end training. It sets a new state-of-the-art on the 3DMatch, KITTI, and ModelNet benchmarks

Efficient solutions to the relative pose of three calibrated cameras from four points using virtual correspondences

We study the challenging problem of estimating the relative pose of three calibrated cameras. We propose two novel solutions to the notoriously difficult configuration of four points in three views, known as the 4p3v problem. Our solutions are based on the simple idea of generating one additional virtual point correspondence in two views by using the information from the locations of the four input correspondences in the three views. For the first solver, we train a network to predict this point correspondence. The second solver uses a much simpler and more efficient strategy based on the mean points of three corresponding input points. The new solvers are efficient and easy to implement since they are based on the existing efficient minimal solvers, i.e., the well-known 5-point relative pose and the P3P solvers. The solvers achieve state-of-the-art results on real data. The idea of solving minimal problems using virtual correspondences is general and can be applied to other problems, e.g., the 5-point relative pose problem. In this way, minimal problems can be solved using simpler non-minimal solvers or even using sub-minimal samples inside RANSAC. In addition, we compare different variants of 4p3v solvers with the baseline solver for the minimal configuration consisting of three triplets of points and two points visible in two views. We discuss which configuration of points is potentially the most practical in real applications