Homomorphic Sensing of Subspace Arrangements

Homomorphic sensing is a recent algebraic-geometric framework that studies the unique recovery of points in a linear subspace from their images under a given collection of linear maps. It has been successful in interpreting such a recovery in the case of permutations composed by coordinate projections, an important instance in applications known as unlabeled sensing, which models data that are out of order and have missing values. In this paper, we provide tighter and simpler conditions that guarantee the unique recovery for the single-subspace case, extend the result to the case of a subspace arrangement, and show that the unique recovery in a single subspace is locally stable under noise. We specialize our results to several examples of homomorphic sensing such as real phase retrieval and unlabeled sensing. In so doing, in a unified way, we obtain conditions that guarantee the unique recovery for those examples, typically known via diverse techniques in the literature, as well as novel conditions for sparse and unsigned versions of unlabeled sensing. Similarly, our noise result also implies that the unique recovery in unlabeled sensing is locally stable.Comment: 18 page

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 $n-1$ 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

Unlabeled Principal Component Analysis

We consider the problem of principal component analysis from a data matrix where the entries of each column have undergone some unknown permutation, termed Unlabeled Principal Component Analysis (UPCA). Using algebraic geometry, we establish that for generic enough data, and up to a permutation of the coordinates of the ambient space, there is a unique subspace of minimal dimension that explains the data. We show that a permutation-invariant system of polynomial equations has finitely many solutions, with each solution corresponding to a row permutation of the ground-truth data matrix. Allowing for missing entries on top of permutations leads to the problem of unlabeled matrix completion, for which we give theoretical results of similar flavor. We also propose a two-stage algorithmic pipeline for UPCA suitable for the practically relevant case where only a fraction of the data has been permuted. Stage-I of this pipeline employs robust-PCA methods to estimate the ground-truth column-space. Equipped with the column-space, stage-II applies methods for linear regression without correspondences to restore the permuted data. A computational study reveals encouraging findings, including the ability of UPCA to handle face images from the Extended Yale-B database with arbitrarily permuted patches of arbitrary size in $0.3$ seconds on a standard desktop computer