MAE674-Optimal Estimation Methods

An Analysis of different Estimation tools for parameter estimation in ellipse fitting of Pottery shard data sets
Project Proposal
by
Rajmohan Asokan
Person No:50097503
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Abstract
Parameter Estimation has been an important research area in computer vision applications such as geometric primitives fitting. For the
course project, an analysis of different estimation techniques is done by
implementing them on datasets obtained from pottery shards and compare their performances for the specific problem of fitting ellipses and
ellipsoids on pottery shard datasets.

Introduction

The project will involve estimating elliptic profiles from data points obtained
from the edge co-ordinates of pottery shards. The objective is to compare and
contrast the performances of different estimation techniques in estimating the
ellipse. The motivation is based on the problem of shape reconstruction from
pottery shards which is a problem of significant importance in the archaeological
sciences. It is an interesting problem in the sense that ellipse fitting will have
to take care of noisy data from the images as well as the irregular shape of the
pottery shard itself.

Project Outline

The first step is the 3D reconstruction of pottery shard from the 2D stereo image pair. Since the 3D reconstruction technique is out of scope for the course,
the discussion on this part will be minimal to give more focus to the estimation techniques. Once the real world xy-coordinate of the edges of the pottery
shard is available after the 3D reconstruction stage, an attempt is made to fit
ellipses to the datasets using linear least squares. The result is compared with
Direct Least squares method proposed by Fitzgibbon, Pilu and Fisher[1]. Also
the drawbacks of the Fitzgibbons method is verified using synthetic data and
the modified version of Fitzgibbons method i.e. Stable Direct Least Squares
Method proposed by Halr and Flusser[2] is verified for its stability in taking
care of the drawbacks of Fitzgibbons method by both synthetic data and real
world data obtained from the pottery shard.

2.1

A glimpse of Direct Least Squares Method

This section provides a brief overview of Direct Least Squares Method by Fitzgibbon et al.[1] that is going be used in estimating the ellipses from the pottery
shard data. In this abstract, the methods capability is demonstrated by implementing the algorithm on the edge coordinates of a synthetically generated
elliptical arc. The ellipse defined by a second order polynomial equation is given
by
F (x, y) = ax2 + bxy + cy 2 + dx + ey + f = 0

(1)

and the ellipse constraint equation is given by b2 4ac < 0 to obtain an ellipse
specific solution. The coefficients of the ellipse are a, b, c, d, e, f and x, y are the
coordinates of the datapoints. The polynomial equation is the algebraic distance of datapoints x, y to the ellipse given by
Fa (X) = X.a = 0

(2)

where a = [a, b, c, d, e, f ]T and X = [x2 , xy, y 2 , x, y, 1]. The ellipse constraint is

scaled, since scaling does not alter the representation of the ellipse, as
4ac b2 = 1

(3)

The fitting problem is formulated as

mina ||D.a||2

(4)

aT Ca = 1

(5)

The constraint is given by

where D is the design matrix and is given by,
2
x1 y1 y12 x1
x1
.
.
.
.
D=
.
.
.
.
2
xN
x2N xN yN yN

y1
.
.
yN

And the constraint matrix C is given by

0 0 2 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 0 0

2 0 0 0 0 0

C=
0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0

1
.

.
1

(6)

(7)

Using Lagrange multiplier

Sa = Ca

(8)

where S = DT D. The equation(8) is a generalized eigenvector problem since

both S and C are matrices. The coefficients of the ellipse correspond to the
eigenvector of the minimum positive eigenvalue. Although an efficient algorithm
to compute an ellipse specific solution, it has its own limitations and drawbacks
which will be discussed in detail in the Project report. The above figure shows
the ellipse fitted to the data points of an elliptic arc using Fitzgibbons method
which is without noise. The ellipse fitted is a smooth one for the noise free
synthetic data. In the project, its effectiveness will be tested on real world data
obtained from pottery shard and compared to the ellipse fitting by its stable
counterpart and other tools from estimation theory.

2.2

Numerically stable Direct Least Squares Method

The limitations of the direct least squares method is stated to have been overcome by the numerically stable method proposed by Halr and Flusser in [2].
The problem with both the Direct Least Squares method and its numerically
stable version is that it can be employed only on an elliptic segmented data.
Fitted Ellipse & Data Points
500
Ellipse Fit
Data Points
450

400

350

300

250

200

150
50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Figure 1: New
It is not possible to fit ellipses to data points belonging to different ellipse
profiles.

2.3

Comparison to Kalman Filter and RANSAC based

Ellipse Fitting

The results obtained from least square methods are compared to the results
of Kalman filter and Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) based ellipse fitting. The literature provides proof that the Kalman filtering can efficiently
handle data uncertainty and RANSAC is efficient in handling outliers and also
RANSAC is able to detect multiple ellipses if there are data points belonging to
different ellipse profiles. The performance of all these techniques are discussed
in terms of their computational expense, handling outliers and ability to detect
ellipses from non segmented data and other performance metric to be explored
in the due course of the project.

2.4

Extending the technique to fit ellipsoid

The techniques mentioned in the previous sections are extended to fit ellipsoids
to the 3D xyz coordinates available from the 3D reconstructed image and will

be evaluated with regard to the fitted ellipsoids since 3D primitive fitting are
the desired outcome in the problem of shape reconstruction.

References
[1] Andrew Fitzgibbon, Maurizio Pilu, and Robert B Fisher. Direct least square
fitting of ellipses. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, 21(5):476480, 1999.
[2] Radim Halr and Jan Flusser. Numerically stable direct least squares fitting of ellipses. In Proc. 6th International Conference in Central Europe on
Computer Graphics and Visualization. WSCG, volume 98, pages 125132.
Citeseer, 1998.
[3] Walter Gander, Gene H Golub, and Rolf Strebel. Least-squares fitting of
circles and ellipses. BIT Numerical Mathematics, 34(4):558578, 1994.
[4] John Porrill. Fitting ellipses and predicting confidence envelopes using a
bias corrected kalman filter. Image and vision computing, 8(1):3741, 1990.
[5] Zhengyou Zhang. Parameter estimation techniques: A tutorial with application to conic fitting. Image and vision Computing, 15(1):5976, 1997.
[6] Tim Ellis, Ahmed Abbood, and Beatrice Brillault. Ellipse detection and
matching with uncertainty. Image and vision computing, 10(5):271276,
1992.