In this paper, we propose a simple and effective geometric model fitting method to fit and segment multi-structure data even in the presence of severe outliers. We cast the task of geometric model fitting as a representative mode-seeking problem on hypergraphs. Specifically, a hypergraph is first constructed, where the vertices represent model hypotheses and the hyperedges denote data points. The hypergraph involves higher-order similarities (instead of pairwise similarities used on a simple graph), and it can characterize complex relationships between model hypotheses and data points. In addition, we develop a hypergraph reduction technique to remove “insignificant” vertices while retaining as many “significant” vertices as possible in the hypergraph. Based on the simplified hypergraph, we then propose a novel mode-seeking algorithm to search for representative modes within reasonable time. Finally, the proposed mode-seeking algorithm detects modes according to two key elements, i.e., the weighting scores of vertices and the similarity analysis between vertices. Overall, the proposed fitting method is able to efficiently and effectively estimate the number and the parameters of model instances in the data simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant superiority over several state-of-the-art model fitting methods on both synthetic data and real images.
In addition to the above-mentioned robust fitting methods, there are several other related fitting methods, such as KF @cite_11 , J-linkage @cite_19 , T-linkage @cite_24 , SCAMS @cite_4 , PM @cite_27 , PEARL @cite_1 , AKSWH @cite_14 , HS @cite_18 , RELRT @cite_31 and GMD @cite_33 . KF, J-linkage, T-linkage and SCAMS directly deal with data points for model fitting but they are sensitive to unbalanced data distributions that are quite common in practical applications . In addition, these methods have difficulties in dealing with the data points near the intersection of model instances. The computational costs of J-linkage and T-linkage are high due to the use of the agglomerative clustering procedure. The other robust fitting methods also have some problems. For example, PM requires the input of the number of model instances in data; PEARL is sensitive to the initial generated hypotheses; AKSWH may remove some good model hypotheses corresponding to the correct model instances involving a small number of data points, during the procedure of selecting significant hypotheses; HS encounters the computational complexity problem due to the expansion and dropping strategy used; both RELRT and GMD only work for single-structure data.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_1 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_31 @cite_11
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This paper tackles the problem of fitting multiple instances of a model to data corrupted by noise and outliers. The proposed solution is based on random sampling and conceptual data representation. Each point is represented with the characteristic function of the set of random models that fit the point. A tailored agglomerative clustering, called J-linkage, is used to group points belonging to the same model. The method does not require prior specification of the number of models, nor it necessitate parameters tuning. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performances of the algorithm. We propose a robust fitting framework, called Adaptive Kernel-Scale Weighted Hypotheses (AKSWH), to segment multiple-structure data even in the presence of a large number of outliers. Our framework contains a novel scale estimator called Iterative Kth Ordered Scale Estimator (IKOSE). IKOSE can accurately estimate the scale of inliers for heavily corrupted multiple-structure data and is of interest by itself since it can be used in other robust estimators. In addition to IKOSE, our framework includes several original elements based on the weighting, clustering, and fusing of hypotheses. AKSWH can provide accurate estimates of the number of model instances and the parameters and the scale of each model instance simultaneously. We demonstrate good performance in practical applications such as line fitting, circle fitting, range image segmentation, homography estimation, and two--view-based motion segmentation, using both synthetic data and real images. Recently, methods with learning procedure have been widely used to solve person re-identification (re-id) problem. However, most existing databases for re-id are smallscale, therefore, over-fitting is likely to occur. To further improve the performance, we propose a novel method by fusing multiple local features and exploring their structural information on different levels. The proposed method is called Structural Constraints Enhanced Feature Accumulation (SCEFA). Three local features (i.e., Hierarchical Weighted Histograms (HWH), Gabor Ternary Pattern HSV (GTP-HSV), Maximally Stable Color Regions (MSCR)) are used. Structural information of these features are deeply explored in three levels: pixel, blob, and part. The matching algorithms corresponding to the features are also discussed. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets: VIPeR, ETHZ and our own challenging dataset MCSSH, show that our approach outperforms stat-of-the-art methods significantly. A hierarchical Bayes Gaussian Mixture Model (HBGMM) with adaptive sparsity is proposed.We impose our hierarchical Bayes prior on the entries of precision matrices in GMM to encourage sparsity.Our adaptive sparsity can reduce the dimensionality of the parameters in GMM to be estimated.Our HBGMM method does not involve any hyperparameters to be estimated, i.e., it is hyperparameter-free. Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) has been widely used in statistics for its great flexibility. However, parameter estimation for GMM with high dimensionality is a challenge because of the large number of parameters and the lack of observation data. In this paper, we propose an effective method named hierarchical Bayes based Adaptive Sparsity in Gaussian Mixture Model (ASGMM) to estimate the parameters in a GMM by incorporating a two-layer hierarchical Bayes based adaptive sparsity prior. The prior we impose on the precision matrices can encourage sparsity and hence reduce the dimensionality of the parameters to be estimated. In contrast to the l 1 -norm penalty or Laplace prior, our approach does not involve any hyperparameters that must be tuned, and the sparsity adapts to the observation data. The proposed method is achieved by three steps: first, we formulate an adaptive hierarchical Bayes model of the precision matrices in the GMM with a Jeffrey's noninformative hyperprior, which expresses scale-invariance and, more importantly, is hyperparameter-free and unbiased. Second, we perform a Cholesky decomposition on the precision matrices to impose the positive definite property. Finally, we exploit the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to obtain the final estimated parameters in the GMM. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ASGMM cannot only adapt the sparsity of high-dimensional data with small estimated error, but also achieve better clustering performance comparing with several classical methods. This paper presents an improvement of the J-linkage algorithm for fitting multiple instances of a model to noisy data corrupted by outliers. The binary preference analysis implemented by J-linkage is replaced by a continuous (soft, or fuzzy) generalization that proves to perform better than J-linkage on simulated data, and compares favorably with state of the art methods on public domain real datasets. The representation of a knowledge graph (KG) in a latent space recently has attracted more and more attention. To this end, some proposed models (e.g., TransE) embed entities and relations of a KG into a "point" vector space by optimizing a global loss function which ensures the scores of positive triplets are higher than negative ones. We notice that these models always regard all entities and relations in a same manner and ignore their (un)certainties. In fact, different entities and relations may contain different certainties, which makes identical certainty insufficient for modeling. Therefore, this paper switches to density-based embedding and propose KG2E for explicitly modeling the certainty of entities and relations, which learn the representations of KGs in the space of multi-dimensional Gaussian distributions. Each entity relation is represented by a Gaussian distribution, where the mean denotes its position and the covariance (currently with diagonal covariance) can properly represent its certainty. In addition, compared with the symmetric measures used in point-based methods, we employ the KL-divergence for scoring triplets, which is a natural asymmetry function for effectively modeling multiple types of relations. We have conducted extensive experiments on link prediction and triplet classification with multiple benchmark datasets (WordNet and Freebase). Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively model the (un)certainties of entities and relations in a KG, and it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (including TransH and TransR). In this paper, we propose three criteria for efficient sample selection in case of data stream regression problems within an online active learning context. The selection becomes important whenever the target values, which guide the update of the regressors as well as the implicit model structures, are costly or time-consuming to measure and also in case when very fast models updates are required to cope with stream mining real-time demands. Reducing the selected samples as much as possible while keeping the predictive accuracy of the models on a high level is, thus, a central challenge. This should be ideally achieved in unsupervised and single-pass manner. Our selection criteria rely on three aspects: 1) the extrapolation degree combined with the model's nonlinearity degree , which is measured in terms of a new specific homogeneity criterion among adjacent local approximators; 2) the uncertainty in model outputs, which can be measured in terms of confidence intervals using so-called adaptive local error bars — we integrate a weighted localization of an incremental noise level estimator and propose formulas for online merging of local error bars; 3) the uncertainty in model parameters, which is estimated by the so-called A-optimality criterion, which relies on the Fisher information matrix. The selection criteria are developed in combination with evolving generalized Takagi–Sugeno (TS) fuzzy models (containing rules in arbitrarily rotated position), as it could be shown in previous publications that these outperform conventional evolving TS models (containing axis-parallel rules). The results based on three high-dimensional real-world streaming problems show that a model update based on only 10 –20 selected samples can still achieve similar accumulated model errors over time to the case when performing a full model update on all samples. This can be achieved with a negligible sensitivity on the size of the active learning latency buffer. Random sampling with the same percentages of samples selected, however, achieved much higher error rates. Hence, the intelligence in our sample selection concept leads to an economic balance between model accuracy and measurement as well computational costs for model updates. We present a new method for clustering based on compression. The method does not use subject-specific features or background knowledge, and works as follows: First, we determine a parameter-free, universal, similarity distance, the normalized compression distance or NCD, computed from the lengths of compressed data files (singly and in pairwise concatenation). Second, we apply a hierarchical clustering method. The NCD is not restricted to a specific application area, and works across application area boundaries. A theoretical precursor, the normalized information distance, co-developed by one of the authors, is provably optimal. However, the optimality comes at the price of using the noncomputable notion of Kolmogorov complexity. We propose axioms to capture the real-world setting, and show that the NCD approximates optimality. To extract a hierarchy of clusters from the distance matrix, we determine a dendrogram (ternary tree) by a new quartet method and a fast heuristic to implement it. The method is implemented and available as public software, and is robust under choice of different compressors. To substantiate our claims of universality and robustness, we report evidence of successful application in areas as diverse as genomics, virology, languages, literature, music, handwritten digits, astronomy, and combinations of objects from completely different domains, using statistical, dictionary, and block sorting compressors. In genomics, we presented new evidence for major questions in Mammalian evolution, based on whole-mitochondrial genomic analysis: the Eutherian orders and the Marsupionta hypothesis against the Theria hypothesis. Abstract In this paper, we introduce a new (constructive) characterization of tight wavelet frames on non-flat domains in both continuum setting, i.e. on manifolds, and discrete setting, i.e. on graphs; we discuss how fast tight wavelet frame transforms can be computed and how they can be effectively used to process graph data. We start with defining the quasi-affine systems on a given manifold M . The quasi-affine system is formed by generalized dilations and shifts of a finite collection of wavelet functions Ψ : = ψ j : 1 ≤ j ≤ r ⊂ L 2 ( R ) . We further require that ψ j is generated by some refinable function ϕ with mask a j . We present the condition needed for the masks a j : 0 ≤ j ≤ r , as well as regularity conditions needed for ϕ and ψ j , so that the associated quasi-affine system generated by Ψ is a tight frame for L 2 ( M ) . The condition needed for the masks is a simple set of algebraic equations which are not only easy to verify for a given set of masks a j , but also make the construction of a j entirely painless. Then, we discuss how the transition from the continuum (manifolds) to the discrete setting (graphs) can be naturally done. In order for the proposed discrete tight wavelet frame transforms to be useful in applications, we show how the transforms can be computed efficiently and accurately by proposing the fast tight wavelet frame transforms for graph data (WFTG). Finally, we consider two specific applications of the proposed WFTG: graph data denoising and semi-supervised clustering. Utilizing the sparse representation provided by the WFTG, we propose l 1 -norm based optimization models on graphs for denoising and semi-supervised clustering. On one hand, our numerical results show significant advantage of the WFTG over the spectral graph wavelet transform (SGWT) by [1] for both applications. On the other hand, numerical experiments on two real data sets show that the proposed semi-supervised clustering model using the WFTG is overall competitive with the state-of-the-art methods developed in the literature of high-dimensional data classification, and is superior to some of these methods. Three Bayesian related approaches, namely, variational Bayesian (VB), minimum message length (MML) and Bayesian Ying-Yang (BYY) harmony learning, have been applied to automatically determining an appropriate number of components during learning Gaussian mixture model (GMM). This paper aims to provide a comparative investigation on these approaches with not only a Jeffreys prior but also a conjugate Dirichlet-Normal-Wishart (DNW) prior on GMM. In addition to adopting the existing algorithms either directly or with some modifications, the algorithm for VB with Jeffreys prior and the algorithm for BYY with DNW prior are developed in this paper to fill the missing gap. The performances of automatic model selection are evaluated through extensive experiments, with several empirical findings: 1) Considering priors merely on the mixing weights, each of three approaches makes biased mistakes, while considering priors on all the parameters of GMM makes each approach reduce its bias and also improve its performance. 2) As Jeffreys prior is replaced by the DNW prior, all the three approaches improve their performances. Moreover, Jeffreys prior makes MML slightly better than VB, while the DNW prior makes VB better than MML. 3) As the hyperparameters of DNW prior are further optimized by each of its own learning principle, BYY improves its performances while VB and MML deteriorate their performances when there are too many free hyper-parameters. Actually, VB and MML lack a good guide for optimizing the hyper-parameters of DNW prior. 4) BYY considerably outperforms both VB and MML for any type of priors and whether hyper-parameters are optimized. Being different from VB and MML that rely on appropriate priors to perform model selection, BYY does not highly depend on the type of priors. It has model selection ability even without priors and performs already very well with Jeffreys prior, and incrementally improves as Jeffreys prior is replaced by the DNW prior. Finally, all algorithms are applied on the Berkeley segmentation database of real world images. Again, BYY considerably outperforms both VB and MML, especially in detecting the objects of interest from a confusing background. In this paper we propose a general framework for the uncertainty quantification of quantities of interest for high-contrast single-phase flow problems. It is based on the generalized multiscale finite element method (GMsFEM) and multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods. The former provides a hierarchy of approximations of different resolution, whereas the latter gives an efficient way to estimate quantities of interest using samples on different levels. The number of basis functions in the online GMsFEM stage can be varied to determine the solution resolution and the computational cost, and to efficiently generate samples at different levels. In particular, it is cheap to generate samples on coarse grids but with low resolution, and it is expensive to generate samples on fine grids with high accuracy. By suitably choosing the number of samples at different levels, one can leverage the expensive computation in larger fine-grid spaces toward smaller coarse-grid spaces, while retaining the accuracy of the final Monte Carlo estimate. Further, we describe a multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo method, which sequentially screens the proposal with different levels of approximations and reduces the number of evaluations required on fine grids, while combining the samples at different levels to arrive at an accurate estimate. The framework seamlessly integrates the multiscale features of the GMsFEM with the multilevel feature of the MLMC methods following the work in [26], and our numerical experiments illustrate its efficiency and accuracy in comparison with standard Monte Carlo estimates. We present a framework for robustly estimating registration between a 3D volume image and a 2D projection image and evaluate its precision and robustness in spine interventions for vertebral localization in the presence of anatomical deformation. The framework employs a normalized gradient information similarity metric and multi-start covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy optimization with local-restarts, which provided improved robustness against deformation and content mismatch. The parallelized implementation allowed orders-of-magnitude acceleration in computation time and improved the robustness of registration via multi-start global optimization. Experiments involved a cadaver specimen and two CT datasets (supine and prone) and 36 C-arm fluoroscopy images acquired with the specimen in four positions (supine, prone, supine with lordosis, prone with kyphosis), three regions (thoracic, abdominal, and lumbar), and three levels of geometric magnification (1.7, 2.0, 2.4). Registration accuracy was evaluated in terms of projection distance error (PDE) between the estimated and true target points in the projection image, including 14 400 random trials (200 trials on the 72 registration scenarios) with initialization error up to ±200 mm and ±10°. The resulting median PDE was better than 0.1 mm in all cases, depending somewhat on the resolution of input CT and fluoroscopy images. The cadaver experiments illustrated the tradeoff between robustness and computation time, yielding a success rate of 99.993 in vertebral labeling (with 'success' defined as PDE <5 mm) using 1,718 664 ± 96 582 function evaluations computed in 54.0 ± 3.5 s on a mid-range GPU (nVidia, GeForce GTX690). Parameters yielding a faster search (e.g., fewer multi-starts) reduced robustness under conditions of large deformation and poor initialization (99.535 success for the same data registered in 13.1 s), but given good initialization (e.g., ±5 mm, assuming a robust initial run) the same registration could be solved with 99.993 success in 6.3 s. The ability to register CT to fluoroscopy in a manner robust to patient deformation could be valuable in applications such as radiation therapy, interventional radiology, and an assistant to target localization (e.g., vertebral labeling) in image-guided spine surgery. Tasks such as record linkage and multi-target tracking, which involve reconstructing the set of objects that underlie some observed data, are particularly challenging for probabilistic inference. Recent work has achieved efficient and accurate inference on such problems using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques with customized proposal distributions. Currently, implementing such a system requires coding MCMC state representations and acceptance probability calculations that are specific to a particular application. An alternative approach, which we pursue in this paper, is to use a general-purpose probabilistic modeling language (such as BLOG) and a generic Metropolis-Hastings MCMC algorithm that supports user-supplied proposal distributions. Our algorithm gains flexibility by using MCMC states that are only partial descriptions of possible worlds; we provide conditions under which MCMC over partial worlds yields correct answers to queries. We also show how to use a context-specific Bayes net to identify the factors in the acceptance probability that need to be computed for a given proposed move. Experimental results on a citation matching task show that our general-purpose MCMC engine compares favorably with an application-specific system. Geometric model fitting is a typical chicken-&-egg problem: data points should be clustered based on geometric proximity to models whose unknown parameters must be estimated at the same time. Most existing methods, including generalizations of RANSAC, greedily search for models with most inliers (within a threshold) ignoring overall classification of points. We formulate geometric multi-model fitting as an optimal labeling problem with a global energy function balancing geometric errors and regularity of inlier clusters. Regularization based on spatial coherence (on some near-neighbor graph) and or label costs is NP hard. Standard combinatorial algorithms with guaranteed approximation bounds (e.g. ?-expansion) can minimize such regularization energies over a finite set of labels, but they are not directly applicable to a continuum of labels, e.g. @math in line fitting. Our proposed approach (PEaRL) combines model sampling from data points as in RANSAC with iterative re-estimation of inliers and models' parameters based on a global regularization functional. This technique efficiently explores the continuum of labels in the context of energy minimization. In practice, PEaRL converges to a good quality local minimum of the energy automatically selecting a small number of models that best explain the whole data set. Our tests demonstrate that our energy-based approach significantly improves the current state of the art in geometric model fitting currently dominated by various greedy generalizations of RANSAC. Many models in computer education and assessment take into account difficulty. However, despite the positive results of models that take difficulty in to account, knowledge tracing is still used in its basic form due to its skill level diagnostic abilities that are very useful to teachers. This leads to the research question we address in this work: Can KT be effectively extended to capture item difficulty and improve prediction accuracy? There have been a variety of extensions to KT in recent years. One such extension was Baker's contextual guess and slip model. While this model has shown positive gains over KT in internal validation testing, it has not performed well relative to KT on unseen in-tutor data or post-test data, however, it has proven a valuable model to use alongside other models. The contextual guess and slip model increases the complexity of KT by adding regression steps and feature generation. The added complexity of feature generation across datasets may have hindered the performance of this model. Therefore, one of the aims of our work here is to make the most minimal of modifications to the KT model in order to add item difficulty and keep the modification limited to changing the topology of the model. We analyze datasets from two intelligent tutoring systems with KT and a model we have called KT-IDEM (Item Difficulty Effect Model) and show that substantial performance gains can be achieved with this minor modification that incorporates item difficulty. We describe a general technique that yields the first Statistical Query lower bounds for a range of fundamental high-dimensional learning problems involving Gaussian distributions. Our main results are for the problems of (1) learning Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), and (2) robust (agnostic) learning of a single unknown Gaussian distribution. For each of these problems, we show a super-polynomial gap between the (information-theoretic) sample complexity and the computational complexity of any Statistical Query algorithm for the problem. Our SQ lower bound for Problem (1) is qualitatively matched by known learning algorithms for GMMs. Our lower bound for Problem (2) implies that the accuracy of the robust learning algorithm in DiakonikolasKKLMS16 is essentially best possible among all polynomial-time SQ algorithms. Our SQ lower bounds are attained via a unified moment-matching technique that is useful in other contexts and may be of broader interest. Our technique yields nearly-tight lower bounds for a number of related unsupervised estimation problems. Specifically, for the problems of (3) robust covariance estimation in spectral norm, and (4) robust sparse mean estimation, we establish a quadratic statistical--computational tradeoff for SQ algorithms, matching known upper bounds. Finally, our technique can be used to obtain tight sample complexity lower bounds for high-dimensional testing problems. Specifically, for the classical problem of robustly testing an unknown mean (known covariance) Gaussian, our technique implies an information-theoretic sample lower bound that scales linearly in the dimension. Our sample lower bound matches the sample complexity of the corresponding robust learning problem and separates the sample complexity of robust testing from standard (non-robust) testing. When clusters with different densities and noise lie in a spatial point set, the major obstacle to classifying these data is the determination of the thresholds for classification, which may form a series of bins for allocating each point to different clusters. Much of the previous work has adopted a model-based approach, but is either incapable of estimating the thresholds in an automatic way, or limited to only two point processes, i.e. noise and clusters with the same density. In this paper, we present a new density-based cluster method (DECODE), in which a spatial data set is presumed to consist of different point processes and clusters with different densities belong to different point processes. DECODE is based upon a reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) strategy and divided into three steps. The first step is to map each point in the data to its mth nearest distance, which is referred to as the distance between a point and its mth nearest neighbor. In the second step, classification thresholds are determined via a reversible jump MCMC strategy. In the third step, clusters are formed by spatially connecting the points whose mth nearest distances fall into a particular bin defined by the thresholds. Four experiments, including two simulated data sets and two seismic data sets, are used to evaluate the algorithm. Results on simulated data show that our approach is capable of discovering the clusters automatically. Results on seismic data suggest that the clustered earthquakes, identified by DECODE, either imply the epicenters of forthcoming strong earthquakes or indicate the areas with the most intensive seismicity, this is consistent with the tectonic states and estimated stress distribution in the associated areas. The comparison between DECODE and other state-of-the-art methods, such as DBSCAN, OPTICS and Wavelet Cluster, illustrates the contribution of our approach: although DECODE can be computationally expensive, it is capable of identifying the number of point processes and simultaneously estimating the classification thresholds with little prior knowledge. Recent advances in Bayesian learning with large-scale data have witnessed emergence of stochastic gradient MCMC algorithms (SG-MCMC), such as stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), stochastic gradient Hamiltonian MCMC (SGHMC), and the stochastic gradient thermostat. While finite-time convergence properties of the SGLD with a 1st-order Euler integrator have recently been studied, corresponding theory for general SG-MCMCs has not been explored. In this paper we consider general SG-MCMCs with high-order integrators, and develop theory to analyze finite-time convergence properties and their asymptotic invariant measures. Our theoretical results show faster convergence rates and more accurate invariant measures for SG-MCMCs with higher-order integrators. For example, with the proposed efficient 2nd-order symmetric splitting integrator, the mean square error (MSE) of the posterior average for the SGHMC achieves an optimal convergence rate of L-4 5 at L iterations, compared to L-2 3 for the SGHMC and SGLD with 1st-order Euler integrators. Furthermore, convergence results of decreasing-step-size SG-MCMCs are also developed, with the same convergence rates as their fixed-step-size counterparts for a specific decreasing sequence. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets verify our theory, and show advantages of the proposed method in two large-scale real applications. The nearestor near-neighbor query problems arise in a large variety of database applications, usually in the context of similarity searching. Of late, there has been increasing interest in building search index structures for performing similarity search over high-dimensional data, e.g., image databases, document collections, time-series databases, and genome databases. Unfortunately, all known techniques for solving this problem fall prey to the of dimensionality." That is, the data structures scale poorly with data dimensionality; in fact, if the number of dimensions exceeds 10 to 20, searching in k-d trees and related structures involves the inspection of a large fraction of the database, thereby doing no better than brute-force linear search. It has been suggested that since the selection of features and the choice of a distance metric in typical applications is rather heuristic, determining an approximate nearest neighbor should su ce for most practical purposes. In this paper, we examine a novel scheme for approximate similarity search based on hashing. The basic idea is to hash the points Supported by NAVY N00014-96-1-1221 grant and NSF Grant IIS-9811904. Supported by Stanford Graduate Fellowship and NSF NYI Award CCR-9357849. Supported by ARO MURI Grant DAAH04-96-1-0007, NSF Grant IIS-9811904, and NSF Young Investigator Award CCR9357849, with matching funds from IBM, Mitsubishi, Schlumberger Foundation, Shell Foundation, and Xerox Corporation. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 25th VLDB Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999. from the database so as to ensure that the probability of collision is much higher for objects that are close to each other than for those that are far apart. We provide experimental evidence that our method gives signi cant improvement in running time over other methods for searching in highdimensional spaces based on hierarchical tree decomposition. Experimental results also indicate that our scheme scales well even for a relatively large number of dimensions (more than 50). Identifying the underlying model in a set of data contaminated by noise and outliers is a fundamental task in computer vision. The cost function associated with such tasks is often highly complex, hence in most cases only an approximate solution is obtained by evaluating the cost function on discrete locations in the parameter (hypothesis) space. To be successful at least one hypothesis has to be in the vicinity of the solution. Due to noise hypotheses generated by minimal subsets can be far from the underlying model, even when the samples are from the said structure. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of using higher than minimal subset sampling for hypothesis generation. Our empirical studies showed that increasing the sample size beyond minimal size ( @math ), in particular up to @math , will significantly increase the probability of generating a hypothesis closer to the true model when subsets are selected from inliers. On the other hand, the probability of selecting an all inlier sample rapidly decreases with the sample size, making direct extension of existing methods unfeasible. Hence, we propose a new computationally tractable method for robust model fitting that uses higher than minimal subsets. Here, one starts from an arbitrary hypothesis (which does not need to be in the vicinity of the solution) and moves until either a structure in data is found or the process is re-initialized. The method also has the ability to identify when the algorithm has reached a hypothesis with adequate accuracy and stops appropriately, thereby saving computational time. The experimental analysis carried out using synthetic and real data shows that the proposed method is both accurate and efficient compared to the state-of-the-art robust model fitting techniques.