Random sample consensus

Random sample consensus (RANSAC) is an iterative method to estimate parameters of a mathematical model from a set of observed data that contains outliers, when outliers are to be accorded no influence^[clarify] on the values of the estimates. Therefore, it also can be interpreted as an outlier detection method. It is a non-deterministic algorithm in the sense that it produces a reasonable result only with a certain probability, with this probability increasing as more iterations are allowed. The algorithm was first published by Fischler and Bolles at SRI International in 1981. They used RANSAC to solve the location determination problem (LDP), where the goal is to determine the points in the space that project onto an image into a set of landmarks with known locations.

RANSAC uses repeated random sub-sampling. A basic assumption is that the data consists of "inliers", i.e., data whose distribution can be explained by some set of model parameters, though may be subject to noise, and "outliers", which are data that do not fit the model. The outliers can come, for example, from extreme values of the noise or from erroneous measurements or incorrect hypotheses about the interpretation of data. RANSAC also assumes that, given a (usually small) set of inliers, there exists a procedure that can estimate the parameters of a model optimally explaining or fitting this data.

A simple example is fitting a line in two dimensions to a set of observations. Assuming that this set contains both inliers, i.e., points which approximately can be fitted to a line, and outliers, points which cannot be fitted to this line, a simple least squares method for line fitting will generally produce a line with a bad fit to the data including inliers and outliers. The reason is that it is optimally fitted to all points, including the outliers. RANSAC, on the other hand, attempts to exclude the outliers and find a linear model that only uses the inliers in its calculation. This is done by fitting linear models to several random samplings of the data and returning the model that has the best fit to a subset of the data. Since the inliers tend to be more linearly related than a random mixture of inliers and outliers, a random subset that consists entirely of inliers will have the best model fit. In practice, there is no guarantee that a subset of inliers will be randomly sampled, and the probability of the algorithm succeeding depends on the proportion of inliers in the data as well as the choice of several algorithm parameters.

The RANSAC algorithm is a learning technique to estimate parameters of a model by random sampling of observed data. Given a dataset whose data elements contain both inliers and outliers, RANSAC uses the voting scheme to find the optimal fitting result. Data elements in the dataset are used to vote for one or multiple models. The implementation of this voting scheme is based on two assumptions: that the noisy features will not vote consistently for any single model (few outliers) and there are enough features to agree on a good model (few missing data). The RANSAC algorithm is essentially composed of two steps that are iteratively repeated:

The set of inliers obtained for the fitting model is called the consensus set. The RANSAC algorithm will iteratively repeat the above two steps until the obtained consensus set in a certain iteration has enough inliers.

The input to the RANSAC algorithm is a set of observed data values, a model to fit to the observations, and some confidence parameters defining outliers. In more details than the aforementioned RANSAC algorithm overview, RANSAC achieves its goal by repeating the following steps:

To converge to a sufficiently good model parameter set, this procedure is repeated a fixed number of times, each time producing either the rejection of a model because too few points are a part of the consensus set, or a refined model with a consensus set size larger than the previous consensus set.

The generic RANSAC algorithm works as the following pseudocode: