Approximate models for fast and accurate epipolar geometry estimation

This paper investigates the plausibility of using approximate models for hypothesis generation in a RANSAC framework to accurately and reliably estimate the fundamental matrix. Two novel fundamental matrix estimators are introduced that sample two correspondences to generate affine-fundamental matrices for RANSAC hypotheses. A new RANSAC framework is presented that uses local optimization to estimate the fundamental matrix from the consensus correspondence sets of verified hypotheses, which are approximate models. The proposed estimators are shown to perform better than other approximate models that have previously been used in the literature for fundamental matrix estimation in a rigorous evaluation. In addition the proposed estimators are over 30 times faster, in terms of models verified, than the 7-point method, and offer comparable accuracy and repeatability on a large subset of the test set.