Consensus Maximization with Linear Matrix Inequality Constraints

Consensus maximization has proven to be a useful tool for robust estimation. While randomized methods like RANSAC are fast, they do not guarantee global optimality and fail to manage large amounts of outliers. On the other hand, global methods are commonly slow because they do not exploit the structure of the problem at hand. In this paper, we show that the solution space can be reduced by introducing Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) constraints. This leads to significant speed ups of the optimization time even for large amounts of outliers, while maintaining global optimality. We study several cases in which the objective variables have a special structure, such as rotation, scaled-rotation, and essential matrices, which are posed as LMI constraints. This is very useful in several standard computer vision problems, such as estimating Similarity Transformations, Absolute Poses, and Relative Poses, for which we obtain compelling results on both synthetic and real datasets. With up to 90 percent outlier rate, where RANSAC often fails, our constrained approach is consistently faster than the non-constrained one - while finding the same global solution.