Projection Based M-Estimators

Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) is the most widely used robust regression algorithm in computer vision. However, RANSAC has a few drawbacks which make it difficult to use for practical applications. Some of these problems have been addressed through improved sampling algorithms or better cost functions, but an important difficulty still remains. The algorithm is not user independent, and requires knowledge of the scale of the inlier noise. We propose a new robust regression algorithm, the projection based M-estimator (pbM). The pbM algorithm is derived by building a connection to the theory of kernel density estimation and this leads to an improved cost function, which gives better performance. Furthermore, pbM is user independent and does not require any knowledge of the scale of noise corrupting the inliers. We propose a general framework for the pbM algorithm which can handle heteroscedastic data and multiple linear constraints on each data point through the use of Grassmann manifold theory. The performance of pbM is compared with RANSAC and M-Estimator Sample Consensus (MSAC) on various real problems. It is shown that pbM gives better results than RANSAC and MSAC in spite of being user independent.