Fast, Accurate and Memory-Efficient Partial Permutation Synchronization

Abstract: Previous partial permutation synchronization (PPS) algorithms, which are commonly used for multi-object matching, often involve computation-intensive and memory-demanding matrix operations. These operations become intractable for large scale structure-from-motion datasets. For pure permutation synchronization, the recent Cycle-Edge Message Passing (CEMP) framework suggests a memory-efficient and fast solution. Here we overcome the restriction of CEMP to compact groups and propose an improved algorithm, CEMP-Partial, for estimating the corruption levels of the observed partial permutations. It allows us to subsequently implement a nonconvex weighted projected power method without the need of spectral initialization. The resulting new PPS algorithm, MatchFAME (Fast, Accurate and Memory-Efficient Matching), only involves sparse matrix operations, and thus enjoys lower time and space complexities in comparison to previous PPS algorithms. We prove that under adversarial corruption, though without additive noise and with certain assumptions, CEMP-Partial is able to exactly classify corrupted and clean partial permutations. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy, speed and memory efficiency of our method on both synthetic and real datasets.