A recursive robust filtering approach for 3D registration

This work presents a new recursive robust filtering approach for feature-based 3D registration. Unlike the common state-of-the-art alignment algorithms, the proposed method has four advantages that have not yet occurred altogether in any previous solution. For instance, it is able to deal with inherent noise contaminating sensory data; it is robust to uncertainties caused by noisy feature localisation; it also combines the advantages of both (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.) norms for a higher performance and a more prospective prevention of local minima. The result is an accurate and stable rigid body transformation. The latter enables a thorough control over the convergence regarding the alignment as well as a correct assessment of the quality of registration. The mathematical rationale behind the proposed approach is explained, and the results are validated on physical and synthetic data.

ITENE: Intrinsic Transfer Entropy Neural Estimator

Quantifying the directionality of information flow is instrumental in understanding, and possibly controlling, the operation of many complex systems, such as transportation, social, neural, or gene-regulatory networks. The standard Transfer Entropy (TE) metric follows Granger's causality principle by measuring the Mutual Information (MI) between the past states of a source signal $X$ and the future state of a target signal $Y$ while conditioning on past states of $Y$. Hence, the TE quantifies the improvement, as measured by the log-loss, in the prediction of the target sequence $Y$ that can be accrued when, in addition to the past of $Y$, one also has available past samples from $X$. However, by conditioning on the past of $Y$, the TE also measures information that can be synergistically extracted by observing both the past of $X$ and $Y$, and not solely the past of $X$. Building on a private key agreement formulation, the Intrinsic TE (ITE) aims to discount such synergistic information to quantify the degree to which $X$ is \emph{individually} predictive of $Y$, independent of $Y$'s past. In this paper, an estimator of the ITE is proposed that is inspired by the recently proposed Mutual Information Neural Estimation (MINE). The estimator is based on variational bound on the KL divergence, two-sample neural network classifiers, and the pathwise estimator of Monte Carlo gradients.