Smoothed Analysis for Orbit Recovery over $SO(3)$

In this work we study the orbit recovery problem over $SO(3)$, where the goal is to recover a band-limited function on the sphere from noisy measurements of randomly rotated copies of it. This is a natural abstraction for the problem of recovering the three-dimensional structure of a molecule through cryo-electron tomography. Symmetries play an important role: Recovering the function up to rotation is equivalent to solving a system of polynomial equations that comes from the invariant ring associated with the group action. Prior work investigated this system through computational algebra tools up to a certain size. However many statistical and algorithmic questions remain: How many moments suffice for recovery, or equivalently at what degree do the invariant polynomials generate the full invariant ring? And is it possible to algorithmically solve this system of polynomial equations? We revisit these problems from the perspective of smoothed analysis whereby we perturb the coefficients of the function in the basis of spherical harmonics. Our main result is a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for orbit recovery over $SO(3)$ in this model. We analyze a popular heuristic called frequency marching that exploits the layered structure of the system of polynomial equations by setting up a system of {\em linear} equations to solve for the higher-order frequencies assuming the lower-order ones have already been found. The main questions are: Do these systems have a unique solution? And how fast can the errors compound? Our main technical contribution is in bounding the condition number of these algebraically-structured linear systems. Thus smoothed analysis provides a compelling model in which we can expand the types of group actions we can handle in orbit recovery, beyond the finite and/or abelian case.