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Google Releases Key Part of Street View Pipeline

Posted by Soulskill on from the now-you-can-map-your-pillow-fort dept.

New submitter drom writes "Google released a key part of their Street View pipeline as open source on Tuesday: Ceres Solver. It's a large-scale nonlinear least squares minimizer. What does that mean? It's a way to fit a model (like expected position of a car) to data (like GPS positions or accelerometers). The library is completely general and works for many problems. It offers state of the art performance for bundle adjustment problems typical in 3D reconstruction, among others."

1 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Ignore dvh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The video shows you how they use it, not what it is. Parent is just trolling.

    Take a curve, represented by some function with parameters.
    Take a set of data points.
    Fit the curve to the data points by changing the parameters.
    Minimizing the error distances between data points and curve so you get a best fit.

    It's easy enough for lines and polynomials, but for more general functions it becomes a real pain. The maths is straightforward, but the implementation can make a huge difference. Google's library looks like a well implemented minimizer and it's been road tested too.

    This is good.