Evolutionary Optimization for Robust Epipolar-Geometry Estimation and Outlier Detection

In this paper, a robust technique based on a genetic algorithm is proposed for estimating two-view epipolar-geometry of uncalibrated perspective stereo images from putative correspondences containing a high percentage of outliers. The advantages of this technique are three-fold: (i) replacing random search with evolutionary search applying new strategies of encoding and guided sampling; (ii) robust and fast estimation of the epipolar geometry via detecting a more-than-enough set of inliers without making any assumptions about the probability distribution of the residuals; (iii) determining the inlier-outlier threshold based on the uncertainty of the estimated model. The proposed method was evaluated both on synthetic data and real images. The results were compared with the most popular techniques from the state-of-the-art, including RANSAC (random sample consensus), MSAC, MLESAC, Cov-RANSAC, LO-RANSAC, StaRSAC, Multi-GS RANSAC and least median of squares (LMedS). Experimental results showed that the proposed approach performed better than other methods regarding the accuracy of inlier detection and epipolar-geometry estimation, as well as the computational efficiency for datasets majorly contaminated by outliers and noise.