Finding Better Wide Baseline Stereo Solutions Using Feature Quality

Abstract

Many robotic applications that involve relocalization or 3D scene reconstruction, have a need of finding geometry between camera images captured from widely different viewpoints. Computing epipolar geometry between wide baseline image pairs is difficult because often there are many more outliers than inliers computed at the feature correspondence stage. Abundant outliers require the naive approach to compute a huge number of random solutions to give a suitable probability that the correct solution is found. Furthermore, large numbers of outliers can also cause false solutions to appear like true solutions. We present a new method called UNIQSAC for ng weights for features to guide the random solutions towards high quality features, helping find good solutions. We also present a new method to evaluate geometry solutions that is more likely to find correct solutions. We demonstrate in a variety of different outdoor environments using both monocular and stereo image-pairs that our method produces better estimates than existing robust estimation approaches.