Exact simultaneous recovery of locations and structure from known orientations and corrupted point correspondences

Let $t_1,\ldots,t_{n_l} \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and $p_1,\ldots,p_{n_s} \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and consider the bipartite location recovery problem: given a subset of pairwise direction observations $\{(t_i - p_j) / \|t_i - p_j\|_2\}_{i,j \in [n_l] \times [n_s]}$, where a constant fraction of these observations are arbitrarily corrupted, find $\{t_i\}_{i \in [n_ll]}$ and $\{p_j\}_{j \in [n_s]}$ up to a global translation and scale. We study the recently introduced ShapeFit algorithm as a method for solving this bipartite location recovery problem. In this case, ShapeFit consists of a simple convex program over $d(n_l + n_s)$ real variables. We prove that this program recovers a set of $n_l+n_s$ i.i.d. Gaussian locations exactly and with high probability if the observations are given by a bipartite Erdős-Rényi graph, $d$ is large enough, and provided that at most a constant fraction of observations involving any particular location are adversarially corrupted. This recovery theorem is based on a set of deterministic conditions that we prove are sufficient for exact recovery. Finally, we propose a modified pipeline for the Structure for Motion problem, based on this bipartite location recovery problem.