RES-Q: Robust Outlier Detection Algorithm for Fundamental Matrix Estimation

Detection of outliers present in noisy images for an accurate fundamental matrix estimation is an important research topic in the field of 3-D computer vision. Although a lot of research is conducted in this domain, not much study has been done in utilizing the robust statistics for successful outlier detection algorithms. This paper proposes to utilize a reprojection residual error-based technique for outlier detection. Given a noisy stereo image pair obtained from a pair of stereo cameras and a set of initial point correspondences between them, reprojection residual error and 3-sigma principle together with robust statistic-based Qn estimator (RES-Q) is proposed to efficiently detect the outliers and estimate the fundamental matrix with superior accuracy. The proposed RES-Q algorithm demonstrates greater precision and lower reprojection residual error than the state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, in contrast to the assumption of Gaussian noise or symmetric noise model adopted by most previous approaches, the RES-Q is found to be robust for both symmetric and asymmetric random noise assumptions. The proposed algorithm is experimentally tested on both synthetic and real image data sets, and the experiments show that RES-Q is more effective and efficient than the classical outlier detection algorithms.