Google Releases Key Part of Street View Pipeline 44
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."
Mind telling us what are the "Better Technology" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good effort I guess, but there is much better technology out there.
Mind telling us what are the "Better Technology" ?
Thank you !
Usefulness of least squares (Score:4, Insightful)
When you have several measured points, and you want to fit a function to them, least squares is how you measure how closely your function fits. This is useful anytime you want to infer a trend into the future (extrapolation) or infer what values come between the measured values (interpolation).
If you can speed up least-squares calculation, you can test your theories faster and possibly using less hardware - making that kind of statistical analysis more accessible.
In Google's case, they are using it to adjust their raw GPS data so that they can get a more accurate idea of where they are.