An Evaluation of the Performance of RANSAC Algorithms for Stereo Camera Calibration

This paper compares the use of RANSAC for the determination of epi-polar geometry for calibrated stereo reconstruction of 3D data with more conventional optimisation schemes. The paper illustrates the poor convergence efficiency of RANSAC which is explained by a theoretical relationship describing its dependency upon the number of model parameters. The need for an a-priori estimate of outlier contamination proportion is also highlighted. A new algorithm is suggested which attempts to make better use of the solutions found during the RANSAC search while giving a convergence criteria which is independent of outlier proportion. Although no significant benefit can be found for the use of RANSAC on the problem of stereo camera calibration estimation. The new algorithm suggests a simple way of improving the efficiency of RANSAC searches which we believe would be of value in a wide range of machine vision problems.