Taking a Deeper Look at the Inverse Compositional Algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a modern synthesis of the classic inverse compositional algorithm for dense image alignment. We first discuss the assumptions made by this well-established technique, and subsequently propose to relax these assumptions by incorporating data-driven priors into this model. More specifically, we unroll a robust version of the inverse compositional algorithm and replace multiple components of this algorithm using more expressive models whose parameters we train in an end-to-end fashion from data. Our experiments on several challenging 3D rigid motion estimation tasks demonstrate the advantages of combining optimization with learning-based techniques, outperforming the classic inverse compositional algorithm as well as data-driven image-to-pose regression approaches.