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
