Google Releases Key Part of Street View Pipeline

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."

Extra features

[Canazza]

Does it come with built-in Wi-Fi snooping?

Re:Nonlinear least squares for dummies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Least squares is an optimization goal which minimizes a particular metric for a global deviation between an ideal and an achievable solution, that metric being the sum of the squares of individual deviations. A non-linear optimizer performs the optimization for a problem which is formulated in nonlinear equations (i.e. which is not described by a matrix).

Yeah...

[IamTheRealMike]

From the source code:

// The reason why the Triggs approximation becomes so poor is
// because the curvature correction that it applies to the gauss
// newton hessian goes from being a full rank correction to a rank
// deficient correction making the inversion of the Hessian fraught
// with all sorts of misery and suffering.

Yeah, that's pretty much how maths makes me feel as well ...