Global rotation estimation using weighted iterative lie algebraic averaging

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach for a weighted rotation averaging to estimate absolute rotations from relative rotations between two images for a set of multiple overlapping images. The solution does not depend on initial values for the unknown parameters and is robust against outliers. Our approach is one part of a solution for a global image orientation. Often relative rotations are not free from outliers, thus we use the redundancy in available pairwise relative rotations and present a novel graph-based algorithm to detect and eliminate inconsistent rotations. The remaining relative rotations are input to a weighted least squares adjustment performed in the Lie algebra of the rotation manifold SO (3) to obtain absolute orientation parameters for each image. Weights are determined using the prior information we derived from the estimation of the relative rotations. Because we use the Lie algebra of SO (3) for averaging no subsequent adaptation of the results has to be performed but the lossless projection to the manifold. We evaluate our approach on synthetic and real data. Our approach often is able to detect and eliminate all outliers from the relative rotations even if very high outlier rates are present. We show that we improve the quality of the estimated absolute rotations by introducing individual weights for the relative rotations based on various indicators. In comparison with the state-of-the-art in recent publications to global image orientation we achieve best results in the examined datasets.