Robust homography estimation based on non-linear least squares optimization

The homography between image pairs are normally estimated by minimizing a suitable cost function given 2D keypoints correspondences. The correspondences are typically established using descriptor distance of keypoints. However, the correspondences are often incorrect due to ambiguous descriptors which can introduce errors into following homography computing step. There have been numerous attempts to filter out these erroneous correspondences, but, it is unlikely to always achieve perfect matching. To deal with this problem, we propose a non-linear least squares optimization approach to compute homography such that false matches have no or little effect on computed homography. Unlike normal homography computation algorithms, our method formulates not only the keypoints' geometric relationship but also their descriptor similarity into cost function. Moreover, the cost function is parametrized in such a way that incorrect correspondences can be simultaneously identified while the homography is computed. Experiments show that the proposed approach can perform well even with the presence of a large number of outliers.