Relational Epipolar Graphs for Robust Relative Camera Pose Estimation

Estimating relative pose from image pairs fundamentally requires only a minimal subset of geometrically consistent correspondences. However, most learning-based approaches rely on dense matching or direct regression, leading to redundancy and reduced geometric interpretability. In this work, we propose a sparse epipolar matching framework that predicts a compact set of correspondences optimized for geometric consistency across varying temporal baselines. To address residual noise and misalignment, we introduce an epipolar diffusion process that models correspondence uncertainty and refines keypoints toward epipolar consistency. The refined correspondences, along with depth cues, are lifted into a graph representation forming a Steiner graph that encodes relational structure between points. A graph neural network learns a compact subset of informative correspondences, which are passed to a differentiable singular value decomposition solver for end-to-end geometric estimation. Relative pose is recovered from the resulting essential matrix and evaluated in a visual odometry setting on the TartanAir and KITTI SLAM datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that combining sparse matching, diffusion-based refinement, and graph-based subset selection reduces correspondence redundancy while maintaining robust pose estimation across challenging baselines.

Camera pose estimation is a key step in 3D reconstruction and view-synthesis pipelines. We present a deep, global Structure-from-Motion framework based on learned view-graph aggregation. Our method employs a permutation-equivariant, edge-conditioned graph neural network that takes noisy pairwise relative poses as input and outputs globally consistent camera extrinsics. The network is trained without ground-truth supervision, relying solely on a relative-pose consistency objective. This is followed by 3D point triangulation and robust bundle adjustment. Our approach is efficient, scalable to more than a thousand images, and robust to graph density. We evaluate our method on MegaDepth, 1DSfM, Strecha, and BlendedMVS. These experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior rotation and translation accuracy compared to deep track-centric methods while registering more images across many scenes, and competitive results compared to state-of-the-art classical pipelines, while being much faster.

Estimating the relative poses of multi-camera systems is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with critical applications in autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing solutions often suffer from high computational complexity or rely on an excessive number of point correspondences, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these limitations, we propose two efficient minimal solvers for estimating the relative poses of multi-camera systems using a novel parameterization. The first solver leverages the vertical direction prior provided by Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), while the second utilizes the rotation axis direction prior from IMUs. Our methods require only four point correspondences and reduce the problem of multi-camera relative pose estimation to solving a univariate 6th-degree polynomial, a significant improvement over existing approaches, which typically involve 8th-degree polynomials. This reduction in computational complexity and correspondence requirements makes our solvers particularly effective when integrated into RANSAC frameworks, demonstrating strong potential for visual odometry applications. Through rigorous evaluations on synthetic data and the KITTI benchmark, our methods achieved superior computational efficiency and competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.