A Closed-Form Solution to Tensor Voting: Theory and Applications

  • Authors:
  • Tai-Pang Wu;Sai-Kit Yeung;Jiaya Jia;Chi-Keung Tang;Gerard Medioni

  • Affiliations:
  • Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute, Hong Kong;Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore;Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin;Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong;University of Southern California, Los Angeles

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We prove a closed-form solution to tensor voting (CFTV): Given a point set in any dimensions, our closed-form solution provides an exact, continuous, and efficient algorithm for computing a structure-aware tensor that simultaneously achieves salient structure detection and outlier attenuation. Using CFTV, we prove the convergence of tensor voting on a Markov random field (MRF), thus termed as MRFTV, where the structure-aware tensor at each input site reaches a stationary state upon convergence in structure propagation. We then embed structure-aware tensor into expectation maximization (EM) for optimizing a single linear structure to achieve efficient and robust parameter estimation. Specifically, our EMTV algorithm optimizes both the tensor and fitting parameters and does not require random sampling consensus typically used in existing robust statistical techniques. We performed quantitative evaluation on its accuracy and robustness, showing that EMTV performs better than the original TV and other state-of-the-art techniques in fundamental matrix estimation for multiview stereo matching. The extensions of CFTV and EMTV for extracting multiple and nonlinear structures are underway.