AR-005 replaced cv::estimateAffinePartial2D(..., RANSAC, 3.0) with Umeyama
least squares over all five points — the estimator InsightFace aligns with, and
so the one the ArcFace/LVFace training crops were produced by.
The first note here assumed the two agree wherever RANSAC keeps all five points,
leaving a small divergence on non-frontal faces. Measured on 400 gallery
headshots with the model held fixed, that was wrong: the crops disagree by a
median 17 source px and 83.5% embed below cos 0.99 of their Umeyama counterpart.
A 4-DoF similarity is exactly determined by two points, so every minimal sample
fits its own pair perfectly and is scored on the other three; real landmarks sit
a median 2.74 canonical px from any similarity fit, so a landmark outside the
3 px band is the common case and RANSAC returns an under-determined transform.
How much that cost in accuracy is a separate question, and the honest answer is
less than those numbers suggest. Rebuilding the full gallery moved the
intra/inter separation the AR-023 calibration is fitted from by 0.583 to 0.590:
the old warp was wrong but self-consistent, gallery and probe both went through
it, and the embedder tolerates framing variation. The sharper evidence is
duplicate detection — the rebuild dropped 1614 near-duplicates against the
original build's ~100, because unstable two-point fits gave near-identical
images visibly different vectors. That instability, not a headline accuracy
delta, is what a tracker accumulating evidence across frames was paying for.
Also records the AR-030 residual's real-data floor: on the most cooperative
images the pipeline sees, it runs a median 2.74 px, so landmark noise occupies
the first few pixels and the synthetic foreshortening ladder is optimistic about
the low end. Any discount curve has to treat that range as uninformative rather
than as mild pose, and VR-012 must set thresholds against the measured
distribution.
Tests carry the tag they verify: the residual's roll/scale invariance and
monotonicity under foreshortening are what make it a pose measure rather than a
pose-and-everything-else measure.
TRACES: AR-005, AR-030 | SR-002
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