Bundle Adjustment with and without Damping

The least squares adjustment (LSA) method is studied as an optimisation problem and shown to be equivalent to the undamped Gauss-Newton (GN) optimisation method. Three problem-independent damping modifications of the GN method are presented: the line-search method of Armijo (GNA); the LevenbergMarquardt algorithm (LM); and Levenberg-Marquardt with Powell dogleg (LMP). Furthermore, an additional problem-specific “veto” damping technique, based on the chirality condition, is suggested. In a perturbation study on a terrestrial bundle adjustment problem the GNA and LMP methods with veto damping can increase the size of the pull-in region compared to the undamped method; the LM method showed less improvement. The results suggest that damped methods can, in many cases, provide a solution where undamped methods fail and should be available in any LSA software package. Matlab code for the algorithms discussed is available from the authors.