Maximum consensus is one of the most popular criteria for robust estimation in computer vision. Despite its widespread use, optimising the criterion is still customarily done by randomised sample-and-test techniques, which do not guarantee optimality of the result. Several globally optimal algorithms exist, but they are too slow to challenge the dominance of randomised methods. Our work aims to change this state of affairs by proposing an efficient algorithm for global maximisation of consensus. Under the framework of LP-type methods, we show how consensus maximisation for a wide variety of vision tasks can be posed as a tree search problem. This insight leads to a novel algorithm based on A* search. We propose efficient heuristic and support set updating routines that enable A* search to efficiently find globally optimal results. On common estimation problems, our algorithm is much faster than previous exact methods. Our work identifies a promising direction for globally optimal consensus maximisation.

The extension of conventional clustering to hypergraph clustering, which involves higher order similarities instead of pairwise similarities, is increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. This is due to the fact that many clustering problems require an affinity measure that must involve a subset of data of size more than two. In the context of hypergraph clustering, the calculation of such higher order similarities on data subsets gives rise to hyperedges. Almost all previous work on hypergraph clustering in computer vision, however, has considered the smallest possible hyperedge size, due to a lack of study into the potential benefits of large hyperedges and effective algorithms to generate them. In this paper, we show that large hyperedges are better from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint. We then propose a novel guided sampling strategy for large hyperedges, based on the concept of random cluster models. Our method can generate large pure hyperedges that significantly improve grouping accuracy without exponential increases in sampling costs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique on various higher-order grouping problems. In particular, we show that our approach improves the accuracy and efficiency of motion segmentation from dense, long-term, trajectories.

No abstract

This paper introduces a fully deep learning approach to monocular SLAM, which can perform simultaneous localization using a neural network for learning visual odometry (L-VO) and dense 3D mapping. Dense 2D flow and a depth image are generated from monocular images by sub-networks, which are then used by a 3D flow associated layer in the L-VO network to generate dense 3D flow. Given this 3D flow, the dualstream L-VO network can then predict the 6DOF relative pose and furthermore reconstruct the vehicle trajectory. In order to learn the correlation between motion directions, the Bivariate Gaussian modeling is employed in the loss function. The L-VO network achieves an overall performance of 2.68% for average translational error and 0.0143 • /m for average rotational error on the KITTI odometry benchmark. Moreover, the learned depth is leveraged to generate a dense 3D map. As a result, an entire visual SLAM system, that is, learning monocular odometry combined with dense 3D mapping, is achieved.

Multiscale morphological operators are studied extensively in the literature for image processing and feature extraction purposes. In this paper, we model a nonlinear regularization method based on multiscale morphology for edge-preserving super resolution (SR) image reconstruction. We formulate SR image reconstruction as a deblurring problem and then solve the inverse problem using Bregman iterations. The proposed algorithm can suppress inherent noise generated during low-resolution image formation as well as during SR image estimation efficiently. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed regularization and reconstruction method for SR image.