October 8, 2013, 4:00pm
Johnson 175
Sameer Agarwal, Google. 
Ceres Solver

Abstract: Nonlinear least squares problems comes up in a broad range of areas across science and engineering – from fitting curves in statistics, to constructing 3D models from photographs in computer vision. Ceres Solver (http://code.google.com/p/ceres-solver) is a portable C++ library that allows for modeling and solving large complicated nonlinear least squares problems.

Ceres Solver is used at Google to estimate the pose of Street View cars, aircrafts, and satellites; to build 3D models for PhotoTours; stitch panoramic images on your cellphone and more. Outside Google, it is used for robot navigation, semi-conductor physics and financial calculations.

In this talk I will describe Ceres Solver’s architecture, pontificate on what is so awesome about it and some lessons learned in developing and open sourcing it. Small fragments of C++ will make an appearance too.