Rotational Outlier Identification in Pose Graphs using Dual Decomposition

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been an increasing trend to consider Structure from Motion (SfM, in computer vision) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM, in robotics) problems from the point of view of pose averaging (also known as global SfM, in computer vision) or Pose Graph Optimization (PGO, in robotics), where the motion of the camera is reconstructed by considering only relative rigid body transformations instead of including also 3-D points (as done in a full Bundle Adjustment). At a high level, the advantage of this approach is that modern solvers can effectively avoid most of the problems of local minima, and that it is easier to reason about outlier poses (caused by feature mismatches and repetitive structures in the images). In this paper, we contribute to the state of the art of the latter, by proposing a method to detect incorrect orientation measurements prior to pose graph optimization by checking the geometric consistency of rotation measurements. The novel aspects of our method are the use of Expectation-Maximization to fine-tune the covariance of the noise in inlier measurements, and a new approximate graph inference procedure, of independent interest, that is specifically designed to take advantage of evidence on cycles with better performance than standard approaches (Belief Propagation). The paper includes simulation and experimental results that evaluate the performance of our outlier detection and cycle-based inference algorithms on synthetic and real-world data.