Simultaneous multiple rotation averaging using lagrangian duality

Abstract

Multiple rotation averaging is an important problem in computer vision. The problem is challenging because of the nonlinear constraints required to represent the set of rotations. To our knowledge no one has proposed any globally optimal solution for the case of simultaneous updates of the rotations. In this paper we propose a simple procedure based on Lagrangian duality that can be used to verify global optimality of a local solution, by solving a linear system of equations. We show experimentally on real and synthetic data that unless the noise levels are extremely high this procedure always generates the globally optimal solution. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.