Fitting conics to noisy data using stochastic linearization

Fitting conic sections, e.g., ellipses or circles, to noisy data points is a fundamental sensor data processing problem, which frequently arises in robotics. In this paper, we introduce a new procedure for deriving a recursive Gaussian state estimator for fitting conics to data corrupted by additive Gaussian noise. For this purpose, the original exact implicit measurement equation is reformulated with the help of suitable approximations as an explicit measurement equation corrupted by multiplicative noise. Based on stochastic linearization, an efficient Gaussian state estimator is derived for the explicit measurement equation. The performance of the new approach is evaluated by means of a typical ellipse fitting scenario.