Adaptive Annealing for Robust Averaging

摘要

Graduated Non-Convexity (GNC) or Annealing is a popular technique in robust cost minimization for its ability to converge to good local minima irrespective of initialization. However, the conventional use of a fixed annealing scheme in GNC often leads to a poor efficiency vs accuracy tradeoff. To address it, previous approaches introduced adaptive annealing but lacked scalability for large optimization problems. \textit{Averaging} of pairwise relative observations is one such class of problems, defined on a graph, wherein a large number of variables (nodes) are estimated given the pairwise observations (edges). In this paper, we present a novel adaptive GNC framework tailored for averaging problems in computer vision, operating on vector spaces. Leveraging insights from graph Laplacian matrices inherent in such problems, our approach imparts scalability to the principled GNC framework. Our method demonstrates superior accuracy in vector averaging and translation averaging, while maintaining efficiency comparable to baselines.