This paper presents several new results on techniques for solving systems of polynomial equations in computer vision. Gröbner basis techniques for equation solving have been applied successfully to several geometric computer vision problems. However, in many cases these methods are plagued by numerical problems. In this paper we derive a generalization of the Gröbner basis method for polynomial equation solving, which improves overall numerical stability. We show how the action matrix can be computed in the general setting of an arbitrary linear basis for C[x]/I . In particular, two improvements on the stability of the computations are made by studying how the linear basis for C[x]/I should be selected. The first of these strategies utilizes QR factorization with column pivoting and the second is based on singular value decomposition (SVD). Moreover, it is shown how to improve stability further by an adaptive scheme for truncation of the Gröbner basis. These new techniques are studied on some of the latest reported uses of Gröbner basis methods in computer vision and we demonstrate dramatically improved numerical stability making it possible to solve a larger class of problems than previously possible.

strategy for selecting a basis which improves the conditioning of a crucial elimination step, (ii) use this technique to devise a Gröbner basis with improved precision and (iii) show how solving for the eigenvalues instead of eigenvectors can be used to improve precision further while retaining the same speed.We study these methods on some of the latest reported uses of Gröbner basis methods and demonstrate dramatically improved numerical precision using these new techniques making it possible to solve a larger class of problems than previously.

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Abstract. This paper presents a new fast approach to improving stability in polynomial equation solving. Gröbner basis techniques for equation solving have been applied successfully to several geometric computer vision problems. However, in many cases these methods are plagued by numerical problems. An interesting approach to stabilising the computations is to study basis selection for the quotient space C[x]/I. In this paper, the exact matrix computations involved in the solution procedure are clarified and using this knowledge we propose a new fast basis selection scheme based on QR-factorization with column pivoting. We also propose an adaptive scheme for truncation of the Gröbner basis to further improve stability. The new basis selection strategy is studied on some of the latest reported uses of Gröbner basis methods in computer vision and we demonstrate a fourfold increase in speed and nearly as good over-all precision as the previous SVD-based method. Moreover, we get typically get similar or better reduction of the largest errors.

Abstract. We consider the problem of L2-optimal triangulation from three separate views. Triangulation is an important part of numerous computer vision systems. Under gaussian noise, minimizing the L2 norm of the reprojection error gives a statistically optimal estimate. This has been solved for two views. However, for three or more views, it is not clear how this should be done. A previously proposed, but computationally impractical, method draws on Gröbner basis techniques to solve for the complete set of stationary points of the cost function. We show how this method can be modified to become significantly more stable and hence given a fast implementation in standard IEEE double precision. We evaluate the precision and speed of the new method on both synthetic and real data. The algorithm has been implemented in a freely available software package which can be downloaded from the Internet.