Ensemble Method for Robust Motion Estimation

The core of the traditional RANSAC algorithm and its more recent efficient counterparts is the hypothesis evaluation stage, with the focus on finding the best, outlier free hypothesis. Motivated by a non-parametric ensemble techniques, we demonstrate that it proves advantageous to use the entire set of hypotheses generated in the sampling stage. We show that by studying the residual distribution of each data point with respect to the entire set of hypotheses, the problem of inlier/ outlier identification can be formulated as a classification problem. We present extensive simulations of the approach, which in the presence of a large percentage (> 50%) of outliers, provides a repeatable and, an order of magnitude more efficient method compared to the currently existing techniques. Results on widebaseline matching and fundamental matrix estimation are presented.