Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (NIPS 2002)
Ali Rahimi, Trevor Darrell
Given a set of hidden variables with an a-priori Markov structure, we derive an online algorithm which approximately updates the posterior as pairwise measurements between the hidden variables become available. The update is performed using Assumed Density Filtering: to incorporate each pairwise measurement, we compute the optimal Markov structure which represents the true posterior and use it as a prior for incorporating the next measurement. We demonstrate the resulting algorithm by cal- culating globally consistent trajectories of a robot as it navigates along a 2D trajectory. To update a trajectory of length t, the update takes O(t). When all conditional distributions are linear-Gaussian, the algorithm can be thought of as a Kalman Filter which simpliļ¬es the state covariance matrix after incorporating each measurement.