An Effective Bail-out Test for RANSAC Consensus Scoring

The random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, along with its many cousins such as MSAC and MLESAC, has become a standard choice for robust estimation in many computer vision problems. Recently, a raft of modifications to the basic RANSAC algorithm have been proposed aimed at improving its efficiency. Many of these optimizations work by reducing the number of hypotheses that need to be evaluated. This paper proposes a complementary strategy that aims to reduce the average amount of time spent computing the consensus score for each hypothesis. A simple statistical test is proposed that permits the scoring process be terminated early, potentially yielding large computational savings. The proposed test is simple to implement, imposes negligible computational overhead, and is effective for any given size of data set. The approach is evaluated by estimation of the fundamental matrix for a large number of image pairs and is shown to offer a significant reduction in computational cost compared to recently proposed RANSAC modifications.