Cited by 41Robotics and Sensor-Based LocalizationAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsInertial Sensor and Navigation

A Smooth Representation of Belief over SO(3) for Deep Rotation Learning with Uncertainty

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Peretroukhin, Valentin, Giamou, Matthew, Nicholas Greene, W., Rosen, David, Kelly, Jonathan, Roy, Nicholas·2020·Robotics: Science and Systems XVI

Abstract

Accurate rotation estimation is at the heart of robot perception tasks such as visual odometry and object pose estimation.Deep neural networks have provided a new way to perform these tasks, and the choice of rotation representation is an important part of network design.In this work, we present a novel symmetric matrix representation of the 3D rotation group, SO(3), with two important properties that make it particularly suitable for learned models: (1) it satisfies a smoothness property that improves convergence and generalization when regressing large rotation targets, and (2) it encodes a symmetric Bingham belief over the space of unit quaternions, permitting the training of uncertainty-aware models.We empirically validate the benefits of our formulation by training deep neural rotation regressors on two data modalities.First, we use synthetic point-cloud data to show that our representation leads to superior predictive accuracy over existing representations for arbitrary rotation targets.Second, we use image data collected onboard ground and aerial vehicles to demonstrate that our representation is amenable to an effective out-of-distribution (OOD) rejection technique that significantly improves the robustness of rotation estimates to unseen environmental effects and corrupted input images, without requiring the use of an explicit likelihood loss, stochastic sampling, or an auxiliary classifier.This capability is key for safety-critical applications where detecting novel inputs can prevent catastrophic failure of learned models.

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  • Higher-dimensional parameterizations of SO(3) have been proposed that do not suffer from discontinuities.

    “In point cloud registration, higher-dimensional parameterizations of SO(3) have been proposed that do not suffer from this issue [32, 40, 57].”

    From Intraoperative 2D/3D Image Registration via Differentiable X-Ray Rendering (2024) · cites this paper as [40]

    The paper’s ‘Smooth Global Section of SO(3)’ section proves that its ten-dimensional rotation representation has a smooth, continuous mapping, supporting the claim about avoiding discontinuities. It tests rotation estimation on point clouds and mentions point-cloud registration in its ‘Learning-based Rotation Estimation’ section, but does not establish that its representation was proposed specifically for registration. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Higher-dimensional alternatives (d>5) have theoretical advantages.

    “This has motivated the development of several higher-dimensional (d>5) alternatives with theoretical advantages [32, 40, 57].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 12

  1. Alexander Amini, Wilko Schwarting, Guy Rosman, Brandon Araki, Sertac Karaman, and Daniela Rus. Variational Autoencoder for End- to-End Control of Autonomous Driving with Novelty Detection and Training De-biasing. In IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 568-575, 2018.
  2. Timothy D. Barfoot. State Estimation for Robotics. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  3. Christopher Bingham. An Antipodally Symmetric Distribution on the Sphere. The Annals of Statistics, 2(6):1201-1225, 1974.
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  5. Yarin Gal. Uncertainty in Deep Learning. PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016.
  6. Richard Hartley, Jochen Trumpf, Yuchao Dai, and Hongdong Li. Rota- tion Averaging. Intl. J. Computer Vision, 103(3):267-305, 2013.
  7. F. Landis Markley, Yang Cheng, John L. Crassidis, and Yaakov Oshman. Averaging Quaternions. Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 30(4):1193-1197, 2007.
  8. Davide Scaramuzza and Friedrich Fraundorfer. Visual Odometry [Tuto- rial]. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 18(4):80-92, 2011.
  9. Joan Solà, Jeremie Deray, and Dinesh Atchuthan. A micro Lie theory for state estimation in robotics. arXiv:1812.01537 [cs], 2018. · arXiv
  10. Suvrit Sra. Directional Statistics in Machine Learning: A Brief Review. arXiv:1605.00316 [stat], 2016. · arXiv
  11. Grace Wahba. Problem 65-1: A Least Squares Estimate of Satellite Attitude. SIAM Review, 7(3):409-409, 1965.
  12. Brady Zhou, Philipp Krähenbühl, and Vladlen Koltun. Does computer vision matter for action? Science Robotics, 4(30), 2019.

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Authors
Peretroukhin, V., Giamou, M., Nicholas Greene, W., Rosen, D., Kelly, J., & Roy, N.
Affiliations
  • University of Toronto (CA)
  • MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (US)
Venue
Robotics: Science and Systems XVI
Published
2020-07-12
OpenAlex
W3032131819
Cited by
41
References
28
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 1
FWCI
8.85
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Robotics: Science and Systems (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Inertial Sensor and Navigation
Keywords
rotation representation, SO(3), Bingham distribution, uncertainty estimation, visual odometry, object pose estimation, point clouds, aerial vehicles

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