Accelerating Outlier-robust Rotation Estimation by Stereographic Projection
This addresses a fundamental problem in computer vision and robotics for tasks requiring robust rotation estimation, offering significant improvements in speed and accuracy over existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficiently estimating rotation in large inputs with many outliers and noise by proposing a method that uses stereographic projection and spatial voting to identify rotation axis and angle, achieving an angular error of 0.01 degrees and solving large-scale problems with 90% outlier rates in 0.07 seconds.
Rotation estimation plays a fundamental role in many computer vision and robot tasks. However, efficiently estimating rotation in large inputs containing numerous outliers (i.e., mismatches) and noise is a recognized challenge. Many robust rotation estimation methods have been designed to address this challenge. Unfortunately, existing methods are often inapplicable due to their long computation time and the risk of local optima. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust rotation estimation method. Specifically, our method first investigates geometric constraints involving only the rotation axis. Then, it uses stereographic projection and spatial voting techniques to identify the rotation axis and angle. Furthermore, our method efficiently obtains the optimal rotation estimation and can estimate multiple rotations simultaneously. To verify the feasibility of our method, we conduct comparative experiments using both synthetic and real-world data. The results show that, with GPU assistance, our method can solve large-scale ($10^6$ points) and severely corrupted (90\% outlier rate) rotation estimation problems within 0.07 seconds, with an angular error of only 0.01 degrees, which is superior to existing methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency.