# Fixing the RANSAC Stopping Criterion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07829/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [DSAC - Differentiable RANSAC for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05705/) (2016)
- [MAGSAC++, a fast, reliable and accurate robust estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05909/) (2019)
- [Graph-Cut RANSAC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00984/) (2017)
- [MAGSAC: marginalizing sample consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07469/) (2018)
- [Progressive-X: Efficient, Anytime, Multi-Model Fitting Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02290/) (2019)
- [Multi-View Optimization of Local Feature Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08348/) (2020)
- [VSAC: Efficient and Accurate Estimator for H and F](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10240/) (2021)
- [A Large Scale Homography Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09997/) (2023)
- [Space-Partitioning RANSAC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12385/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RANSAC Scoring Done Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27385/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For several decades, RANSAC has been one of the most commonly used robust estimation algorithms for many problems in computer vision and related fields. The main contribution of this paper lies in addressing a long-standing error baked into virtually any system building upon the RANSAC algorithm. Since its inception in 1981 by Fischler and Bolles, many variants of RANSAC have been proposed on top of the same original idea relying on the fact that random sampling has a high likelihood of generating a good hypothesis from minimal subsets of measurements. An approximation to the sampling probability was originally derived by the paper in 1981 in support of adaptively stopping RANSAC and is, as such, used in the vast majority of today's RANSAC variants and implementations. The impact of this approximation has since not been questioned or thoroughly studied by any of the later works. As we theoretically derive and practically demonstrate in this paper, the approximation leads to severe undersampling and thus failure to find good models. The discrepancy is especially pronounced in challenging scenarios with few inliers and high model complexity. An implementation of computing the exact probability is surprisingly simple yet highly effective and has potentially drastic impact across a large range of computer vision systems.