End-to-End Rotation Averaging with Multi-Source Propagation

This paper presents an end-to-end neural network for multiple rotation averaging in SfM. Due to the manifold constraint of rotations, conventional methods usually take two separate steps involving spanning tree based initialization and iterative nonlinear optimization respectively. These methods can suffer from bad initializations due to the noisy spanning tree or outliers in input relative rotations. To handle these problems, we propose to integrate initialization and optimization together in an unified graph neural network via a novel differentiable multi-source propagation module. Specifically, our network utilizes the image context and geometric cues in feature correspondences to reduce the impact of outliers. Furthermore, unlike the methods that utilize the spanning tree to initialize orientations according to a single reference node in a top-down manner, our net-work initializes orientations according to multiple sources while utilizing information from all neighbors in a differentiable way. More importantly, our end-to-end formulation also enables iterative re-weighting of input relative orientations at test time to improve the accuracy of the final estimation by minimizing the impact of outliers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two real-world datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.