Re: [eigen] New Levenberg Marquardt stuff

Dear Christoph,

I think that discussion about releasing ceres is best had elsewhere rather than the eigen mailinglist.

Have you considered punting on the LM library entirely?

Ceres is almost uniformly better than what's there now, is heavily battle
tested in production both large (Street View) and small (Android, in every
Nexus 4), is BSD licensed, uses Eigen internally, has extensive sparse
support.

Well, it might use Eigen internally, but ceres' interface dealing a lot with double-pointers is far away from the clearity of Eigen ...

It's not clear that Eigen dev's time is best spent working on LM when Ceres
exists.

As mentioned already by others, Eigen's LM module existed way longer than Ceres, and there existed a bunch of LM implementations before that.
Furthermore, I agree with opinions raised by others that including a generic non-linear LS solver into Eigen might/should not be the goal of Eigen, which IMHO should basically be a *linear* algebra package.
As long as no further dependencies are introduced (neither for compiling nor for licensing), I don't mind if some small extensions are added, though (clearly not the case for ceres having 2--5 more dependencies).

Keir and I are arguing exactly that, please do not add more stuff into eigen which has nothing to do with linear algebra. We are not arguing for adding Ceres to eigen, but to remove nonlinear optimization code from eigen.

Sameer

Christoph

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Dipl.-Inf. Christoph Hertzberg
Cartesium 0.049
Universität Bremen
Enrique-Schmidt-Straße 5
28359 Bremen

Tel: +49 (421) 218-64252
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