Purposive Sample Consensus: A Paradigm for Model Fitting with Application to Visual Odometry

RANSAC (random sample consensus) is a robust algorithm for model fitting and outliers’ removal, however, it is neither efficient nor reliable enough to meet the requirement of many applications where time and precision is critical. Various algorithms have been developed to improve its performance for model fitting. A new algorithm named PURSAC (purposive sample consensus) is introduced in this paper, which has three major steps to address the limitations of RANSAC and its variants. Firstly, instead of assuming all the samples have a same probability to be inliers, PURSAC seeks their differences and purposively selects sample sets. Secondly, as sampling noise always exists; the selection is also according to the sensitivity analysis of a model against the noise. The final step is to apply a local optimization for further improving its model fitting performance. Tests show that PURSAC can achieve very high model fitting certainty with a small number of iterations. Two cases are investigated for PURSAC implementation. It is applied to line fitting to explain its principles, and then to feature based visual odometry, which requires efficient, robust and precise model fitting. Experimental results demonstrate that PURSAC improves the accuracy and efficiency of fundamental matrix estimation dramatically, resulting in a precise and fast visual odometry. Keywordsrobust model fitting; visual odometry; samples’ reliability; samples’ geometry; sampling noise