Robust estimation is a crucial and still challenging task, which involves estimating model parameters in noisy environments. Although conventional sampling consensus-based algorithms sample several times to achieve robustness, these algorithms cannot use data features and historical information effectively. In this paper, we propose RLSAC, a novel Reinforcement Learning enhanced SAmple Consensus framework for end-to-end robust estimation. RLSAC employs a graph neural network to utilize both data and memory features to guide exploring directions for sampling the next minimum set. The feedback of downstream tasks serves as the reward for unsupervised training. Therefore, RL-SAC can avoid differentiating to learn the features and the feedback of downstream tasks for end-to-end robust estimation. In addition, RLSAC integrates a state transition module that encodes both data and memory features. Our experimental results demonstrate that RLSAC can learn from features to gradually explore a better hypothesis. Through analysis, it is apparent that RLSAC can be easily transferred to other sampling consensus-based robust estimation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, RLSAC is also the first method that uses reinforcement learning to sample consensus for end-to-end robust estimation. We release our codes at https://github.com/IRMVLab/RLSAC.

We propose the Model Quality Network, MQ-Net in short, for predicting the quality, e.g. the pose error of essential matrices, of models generated inside RANSAC. It replaces the traditionally used scoring techniques, e.g., inlier counting of RANSAC, truncated loss of MSAC, and the marginalization-based loss of MAGSAC++. Moreover, Minimal samples Filtering Network (MF-Net) is proposed for the early rejection of minimal samples that likely lead to degenerate models or to ones that are inconsistent with the scene geometry, e.g., due to the chirality constraint. We show on 54450 image pairs from public real-world datasets that the proposed MQ-Net leads to results superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy by a large margin. The proposed MF-Net accelerates the fundamental matrix estimation by five times and significantly reduces the essential matrix estimation time while slightly improving accuracy as well. Also, we show experimentally that consensus maximization, i.e. inlier counting, is not an inherently good measure of the model quality for relative pose estimation. The code is at https://github.com/danini/learning-goad-models-in-ransac.