We consider the problem of localizing a novel image in a large 3D model, given that the gravitational vector is known. In principle, this is just an instance of camera pose estimation, but the scale of the problem introduces some interesting challenges. Most importantly, it makes the correspondence problem very difficult so there will often be a significant number of outliers to handle. To tackle this problem, we use recent theoretical as well as technical advances. Many modern cameras and phones have gravitational sensors that allow us to reduce the search space. Further, there are new techniques to efficiently and reliably deal with extreme rates of outliers. We extend these methods to camera pose estimation by using accurate approximations and fast polynomial solvers. Experimental results are given demonstrating that it is possible to reliably estimate the camera pose despite cases with more than 99 percent outlier correspondences in city-scale models with several millions of 3D points.

In this paper, we propose a practical and efficient method for finding the globally optimal solution to the problem of determining the pose of an object. We present a framework that allows us to use point-to-point, point-to-line, and point-to-plane correspondences for solving various types of pose and registration problems involving euclidean (or similarity) transformations. Traditional methods such as the iterative closest point algorithm or bundle adjustment methods for camera pose may get trapped in local minima due to the nonconvexity of the corresponding optimization problem. Our approach of solving the mathematical optimization problems guarantees global optimality. The optimization scheme is based on ideas from global optimization theory, in particular convex underestimators in combination with branch-and-bound methods. We provide a provably optimal algorithm and demonstrate good performance on both synthetic and real data. We also give examples of where traditional methods fail due to the local minima problem.

In this paper we study the problem of automatically generating polynomial solvers for minimal problems. The main contribution is a new method for finding small elimination templates by making use of the syzygies (i.e. the polynomial relations) that exist between the original equations. Using these syzygies we can essentially parameterize the set of possible elimination templates. We evaluate our method on a wide variety of problems from geometric computer vision and show improvement compared to both handcrafted and automatically generated solvers. Furthermore we apply our method on two previously unsolved relative orientation problems.

Abstract

We consider the problem of localizing a novel image in a large 3D model. In principle, this is just an instance of camera pose estimation, but the scale introduces some challenging problems. For one, it makes the correspondence problem very difficult and it is likely that there will be a significant rate of outliers to handle. In this paper we use recent theoretical as well as technical advances to tackle these problems. Many modern cameras and phones have gravitational sensors that allow us to reduce the search space. Further, there are new techniques to efficiently and reliably deal with extreme rates of outliers. We extend these methods to camera pose estimation by using accurate approximations and fast polynomial solvers. Experimental results are given demonstrating that it is possible to reliably estimate the camera pose despite more than 99% of outlier correspondences. 1