test in both synthetic and real scenarios, and finally,
section 5 discusses the advantages and some sugges-
tions for improving the methodology.
2 OUTLIER DETECTION
Once the information extracted from real world is al-
ready noisy, the 3D reconstruction calculations will
not generate flawless results, but a hypothesis instead
(an intermediate product). A useful method for eval-
uating hypotheses is the RANSAC algorithm (Fis-
chler and Bolles, 1987), which consists of an itera-
tive method to estimate parameters of a mathematical
model based on a set of observations that contains er-
rors.
The RANSAC performs two steps as follows. A
hypothesis is randomly selected and tested with the
full universe of data; if the tests confirm the hypoth-
esis through a threshold determined by the user, this
assumption is saved as a candidate to the final prod-
uct. After estimating several hypotheses, the best one
is chosen as the final product according to predeter-
mined parameters in the process.
The observations that are consistent with the
mathematical model are named inliers and those that
do not meet the predetermined parameters are consid-
ered outliers. To determine whether an observation is
inlier or outlier, the error the hypotheses generate is
compared to a threshold determined by the user. The
RANSAC chooses as its best hypothesis the one with
the highest number of inliers.
A disadvantage of RANSAC is that there is no up-
per bound on the time it takes to compute these pa-
rameters. When the number of performed iterations
is limited, the obtained solution may not be optimal;
in fact, it may not even be minimally appropriate for
the data. In this way, the RANSAC offers the follow-
ing trade-off: a greater number of iterations increases
the probability of conceiving a reasonable model, al-
though the total execution time is also increased. A
final disadvantage of RANSAC is that it requires the
setting of problem-specific thresholds.
Currently, there are many algorithms that are ad-
justments or enhancements of the RANSAC: LMedS
(Rousseeuw and Leroy, 1987), GASAC (Rodehorst
and Hellwich, 2006), StaRSaC (Choi and Medioni,
2009), MSAC (Torr and Zisserman, 2000) and MLE-
SAC (Torr and Zisserman, 2000). These algorithms
are supposed to be more robust than RANSAC. Nev-
ertheless, they all present the same drawback: higher
computational cost. If the input data could have few
outliers initially, the RANSAC alone would generate
good hypothesis in the shortest time possible.
In such context, it would be ideal to remove out-
liers between the tracking phase and the RANSAC
execution. Thus, with as few outliers as possible,
less iterations are necessary and the pipeline can im-
prove its the performance. To achieve that, a tech-
nique for removing outliers should have a computa-
tion cost which is practically imperceptible.
3 SKen TEST
Although not formally proven until the present date,
it is common sense that inliers features follow smooth
paths while outliers do not present smoothness in a
camera path. It was not found in the literature a test
or technique with low computational cost whose pur-
pose was to quantify the smoothness for a camera
path. Thus, in this paper it is presented a hypothesis
test capable of evaluating the smoothness of the fea-
ture path. The hypothesis test proposed, named SKen,
was applied in the context of optical flow, for the paths
of features tracked in the scene. The technique pre-
sented in this paper proposes a methodology for iden-
tifying and ranking features in order of smoothness.
An important factor of the proposed methodology is
that users do not have to enter any parameters in order
to execute the SKen. The result is an automatic and
deterministic method.
3.1 Random Variable
Suppose two features a and b in a video sequence.
At ten frames, the feature a moved to the coordinates
C
a
=(1, 8, 12, 14, 13, 8, 4, 5, 8, 12) and the feature b
moved to C
b
=(1, 8, 12, 10, 13, 8, 9, 5, 8, 12) resulting
in two paths which can be seen in figure 1.
Figure 1: (a) Path of feature a (b) Path of feature b.
The feature a presents a smooth behavior whereas
the feature b is clearly noisy. To verify the smooth-
ness, it is used the second derivative of the function
that generated the feature path. Once the function is
discrete, the derivatives have to be approximated. The
derivatives values are shown in table 1.
It can be observed that for the a feature, the sec-
ond derivative alternate the signal only once due to
SKen:AStatisticalTestforRemovingOutliersinOpticalFlow-A3DReconstructionCase
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