Recent advances on 6D object pose estimation have achieved high performance on representative benchmarks such as LM-O, YCB-V, and T-Less. These datasets capture natural-occurring variations in illumination and camera setup but do not systematically explore the effects of controllable sensor configurations, such as exposure, gain, and depth-sensor modes. To bridge this gap, we introduce SenseShift6D, the first RGB-D object-pose benchmark that physically sweeps 13 RGB exposures, 9 RGB gains, auto-exposure, 4 depth-capture modes, and 5 illumination levels. For six common household objects, we acquire 198.8k RGB and 20.0k depth images (i.e., 795.4k RGB-D scenes), providing 1,380 unique sensor-lighting permutations per object pose. Experiments with state-of-the-art pretrained, generalizable pose estimators reveal substantial performance variation across lighting and sensor settings, despite their large-scale pretraining. Strikingly, even instance-level estimators-trained and tested on identical objects and backgrounds-exhibit pronounced sensitivity to environmental and sensor shifts. These findings establish sensor- and environment-aware robustness as an underexplored yet essential dimension of 6D pose estimation. To illustrate the opportunity enabled by this benchmark, we evaluate test-time sensor selection without retraining. An idealized controller yields remarkable gains of up to +16.2 pp for generalizable models, whereas a practical consistency-based proxy provides only limited improvements, highlighting substantial headroom and the need for future research on reliable sensor-aware adaptation. SenseShift6D is available at huggingface.co/datasets/Yegyu/SenseShift6D.
Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support. To address this, we propose Vanishing Depth, a self-supervised training approach that extends pretrained RGB encoders to incorporate and align metric depth into their feature embeddings. Based on our novel positional depth encoding, we enable stable depth density and depth distribution invariant feature extraction. We achieve performance improvements and SOTA results across a spectrum of relevant RGBD downstream tasks - without the necessity of finetuning the encoder. Most notably, we achieve 56.05 mIoU on SUN-RGBD segmentation, 88.3 RMSE on Void's depth completion, and 83.8 Top 1 accuracy on NYUv2 scene classification. In 6D-object pose estimation, we outperform our predecessors of DinoV2, EVA-02, and Omnivore and achieve SOTA results for non-finetuned encoders in several related RGBD downstream tasks.
Object pose estimation from a single view remains a challenging problem. In particular, partial observability, occlusions, and object symmetries eventually result in pose ambiguity. To account for this multimodality, this work proposes training a diffusion-based generative model for 6D object pose estimation. During inference, the trained generative model allows for sampling multiple particles, i.e., pose hypotheses. To distill this information into a single pose estimate, we propose two novel and effective pose selection strategies that do not require any additional training or computationally intensive operations. Moreover, while many existing methods for pose estimation primarily focus on the image domain and only incorporate depth information for final pose refinement, our model solely operates on point cloud data. The model thereby leverages recent advancements in point cloud processing and operates upon an SE(3)-equivariant latent space that forms the basis for the particle selection strategies and allows for improved inference times. Our thorough experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach on the Linemod dataset and showcase the effectiveness of our design choices. Code is available at https://github.com/zitronian/6DPoseDiffusion .
Estimating rigid objects' poses is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision, with a range of applications across automation and augmented reality. Most existing approaches adopt one network per object class strategy, depend heavily on objects' 3D models, depth data, and employ a time-consuming iterative refinement, which could be impractical for some applications. This paper presents a novel approach, CVAM-Pose, for multi-object monocular pose estimation that addresses these limitations. The CVAM-Pose method employs a label-embedded conditional variational autoencoder network, to implicitly abstract regularised representations of multiple objects in a single low-dimensional latent space. This autoencoding process uses only images captured by a projective camera and is robust to objects' occlusion and scene clutter. The classes of objects are one-hot encoded and embedded throughout the network. The proposed label-embedded pose regression strategy interprets the learnt latent space representations utilising continuous pose representations. Ablation tests and systematic evaluations demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of the CVAM-Pose method for multi-object scenarios. The proposed CVAM-Pose outperforms competing latent space approaches. For example, it is respectively 25% and 20% better than AAE and Multi-Path methods, when evaluated using the $\mathrm{AR_{VSD}}$ metric on the Linemod-Occluded dataset. It also achieves results somewhat comparable to methods reliant on 3D models reported in BOP challenges. Code available: https://github.com/JZhao12/CVAM-Pose
6D object pose estimation aims at determining an object's translation, rotation, and scale, typically from a single RGBD image. Recent advancements have expanded this estimation from instance-level to category-level, allowing models to generalize across unseen instances within the same category. However, this generalization is limited by the narrow range of categories covered by existing datasets, such as NOCS, which also tend to overlook common real-world challenges like occlusion. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Omni6D, a comprehensive RGBD dataset featuring a wide range of categories and varied backgrounds, elevating the task to a more realistic context. 1) The dataset comprises an extensive spectrum of 166 categories, 4688 instances adjusted to the canonical pose, and over 0.8 million captures, significantly broadening the scope for evaluation. 2) We introduce a symmetry-aware metric and conduct systematic benchmarks of existing algorithms on Omni6D, offering a thorough exploration of new challenges and insights. 3) Additionally, we propose an effective fine-tuning approach that adapts models from previous datasets to our extensive vocabulary setting. We believe this initiative will pave the way for new insights and substantial progress in both the industrial and academic fields, pushing forward the boundaries of general 6D pose estimation.
State-of-the-art approaches for 6D object pose estimation assume the availability of CAD models and require the user to manually set up physically-based rendering (PBR) pipelines for synthetic training data generation. Both factors limit the application of these methods in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present a pipeline that does not require CAD models and allows training a state-of-the-art pose estimator requiring only a small set of real images as input. Our method is based on a NeuS2 object representation, that we learn through a semi-automated procedure based on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and object-agnostic segmentation. We exploit the novel-view synthesis ability of NeuS2 and simple cut-and-paste augmentation to automatically generate photorealistic object renderings, which we use to train the correspondence-based SurfEmb pose estimator. We evaluate our method on the LINEMOD-Occlusion dataset, extensively studying the impact of its individual components and showing competitive performance with respect to approaches based on CAD models and PBR data. We additionally demonstrate the ease of use and effectiveness of our pipeline on self-collected real-world objects, showing that our method outperforms state-of-the-art CAD-model-free approaches, with better accuracy and robustness to mild occlusions. To allow the robotics community to benefit from this system, we will publicly release it at https://www.github.com/ethz-asl/neusurfemb.
Category-level 6D object pose estimation aims to estimate the rotation, translation and size of unseen instances within specific categories. In this area, dense correspondence-based methods have achieved leading performance. However, they do not explicitly consider the local and global geometric information of different instances, resulting in poor generalization ability to unseen instances with significant shape variations. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel Instance-Adaptive and Geometric-Aware Keypoint Learning method for category-level 6D object pose estimation (AG-Pose), which includes two key designs: (1) The first design is an Instance-Adaptive Keypoint Detection module, which can adaptively detect a set of sparse keypoints for various instances to represent their geometric structures. (2) The second design is a Geometric-Aware Feature Aggregation module, which can efficiently integrate the local and global geometric information into keypoint features. These two modules can work together to establish robust keypoint-level correspondences for unseen instances, thus enhancing the generalization ability of the model.Experimental results on CAMERA25 and REAL275 datasets show that the proposed AG-Pose outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin without category-specific shape priors.
Estimating robot pose from RGB images is a crucial problem in computer vision and robotics. While previous methods have achieved promising performance, most of them presume full knowledge of robot internal states, e.g. ground-truth robot joint angles. However, this assumption is not always valid in practical situations. In real-world applications such as multi-robot collaboration or human-robot interaction, the robot joint states might not be shared or could be unreliable. On the other hand, existing approaches that estimate robot pose without joint state priors suffer from heavy computation burdens and thus cannot support real-time applications. This work introduces an efficient framework for real-time robot pose estimation from RGB images without requiring known robot states. Our method estimates camera-to-robot rotation, robot state parameters, keypoint locations, and root depth, employing a neural network module for each task to facilitate learning and sim-to-real transfer. Notably, it achieves inference in a single feed-forward pass without iterative optimization. Our approach offers a 12-time speed increase with state-of-the-art accuracy, enabling real-time holistic robot pose estimation for the first time. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Oliverbansk/Holistic-Robot-Pose-Estimation.
We present FoundationPose, a unified foundation model for 6D object pose estimation and tracking, supporting both model-based and model-free setups. Our approach can be instantly applied at test-time to a novel object without fine-tuning, as long as its CAD model is given, or a small number of reference images are captured. We bridge the gap between these two setups with a neural implicit representation that allows for effective novel view synthesis, keeping the downstream pose estimation modules invariant under the same unified framework. Strong generalizability is achieved via large-scale synthetic training, aided by a large language model (LLM), a novel transformer-based architecture, and contrastive learning formulation. Extensive evaluation on multiple public datasets involving challenging scenarios and objects indicate our unified approach outperforms existing methods specialized for each task by a large margin. In addition, it even achieves comparable results to instance-level methods despite the reduced assumptions. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/FoundationPose/
Zero-shot 6D object pose estimation involves the detection of novel objects with their 6D poses in cluttered scenes, presenting significant challenges for model generalizability. Fortunately, the recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) has showcased remarkable zero-shot transfer performance, which provides a promising solution to tackle this task. Motivated by this, we introduce SAM-6D, a novel framework designed to realize the task through two steps, including instance segmentation and pose estimation. Given the target objects, SAM-6D employs two dedicated sub-networks, namely Instance Segmentation Model (ISM) and Pose Estimation Model (PEM), to perform these steps on cluttered RGB-D images. ISM takes SAM as an advanced starting point to generate all possible object proposals and selectively preserves valid ones through meticulously crafted object matching scores in terms of semantics, appearance and geometry. By treating pose estimation as a partial-to-partial point matching problem, PEM performs a two-stage point matching process featuring a novel design of background tokens to construct dense 3D-3D correspondence, ultimately yielding the pose estimates. Without bells and whistles, SAM-6D outperforms the existing methods on the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark for both instance segmentation and pose estimation of novel objects.
In this paper, we address the Sim2Real gap in the field of vision-based tactile sensors for classifying object surfaces. We train a Diffusion Model to bridge this gap using a relatively small dataset of real-world images randomly collected from unlabeled everyday objects via the DIGIT sensor. Subsequently, we employ a simulator to generate images by uniformly sampling the surface of objects from the YCB Model Set. These simulated images are then translated into the real domain using the Diffusion Model and automatically labeled to train a classifier. During this training, we further align features of the two domains using an adversarial procedure. Our evaluation is conducted on a dataset of tactile images obtained from a set of ten 3D printed YCB objects. The results reveal a total accuracy of 81.9%, a significant improvement compared to the 34.7% achieved by the classifier trained solely on simulated images. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. We further validate our approach using the classifier on a 6D object pose estimation task from tactile data.
Category-level object pose estimation involves estimating the 6D pose and the 3D metric size of objects from predetermined categories. While recent approaches take categorical shape prior information as reference to improve pose estimation accuracy, the single-stage network design and training manner lead to sub-optimal performance since there are two distinct tasks in the pipeline. In this paper, the advantage of two-stage pipeline over single-stage design is discussed. To this end, we propose a two-stage deformation-and registration pipeline called DR-Pose, which consists of completion-aided deformation stage and scaled registration stage. The first stage uses a point cloud completion method to generate unseen parts of target object, guiding subsequent deformation on the shape prior. In the second stage, a novel registration network is designed to extract pose-sensitive features and predict the representation of object partial point cloud in canonical space based on the deformation results from the first stage. DR-Pose produces superior results to the state-of-the-art shape prior-based methods on both CAMERA25 and REAL275 benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/Zray26/DR-Pose.git.
Most self-supervised 6D object pose estimation methods can only work with additional depth information or rely on the accurate annotation of 2D segmentation masks, limiting their application range. In this paper, we propose a 6D object pose estimation method that can be trained with pure RGB images without any auxiliary information. We first obtain a rough pose initialization from networks trained on synthetic images rendered from the target's 3D mesh. Then, we introduce a refinement strategy leveraging the geometry constraint in synthetic-to-real image pairs from multiple different views. We formulate this geometry constraint as pixel-level flow consistency between the training images with dynamically generated pseudo labels. We evaluate our method on three challenging datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised methods significantly, with neither 2D annotations nor additional depth images.
Rotation estimation of high precision from an RGB-D object observation is a huge challenge in 6D object pose estimation, due to the difficulty of learning in the non-linear space of SO(3). In this paper, we propose a novel rotation estimation network, termed as VI-Net, to make the task easier by decoupling the rotation as the combination of a viewpoint rotation and an in-plane rotation. More specifically, VI-Net bases the feature learning on the sphere with two individual branches for the estimates of two factorized rotations, where a V-Branch is employed to learn the viewpoint rotation via binary classification on the spherical signals, while another I-Branch is used to estimate the in-plane rotation by transforming the signals to view from the zenith direction. To process the spherical signals, a Spherical Feature Pyramid Network is constructed based on a novel design of SPAtial Spherical Convolution (SPA-SConv), which settles the boundary problem of spherical signals via feature padding and realizesviewpoint-equivariant feature extraction by symmetric convolutional operations. We apply the proposed VI-Net to the challenging task of category-level 6D object pose estimation for predicting the poses of unknown objects without available CAD models; experiments on the benchmarking datasets confirm the efficacy of our method, which outperforms the existing ones with a large margin in the regime of high precision.
One critical challenge in 6D object pose estimation from a single RGBD image is efficient integration of two different modalities, i.e., color and depth. In this work, we tackle this problem by a novel Deep Fusion Transformer~(DFTr) block that can aggregate cross-modality features for improving pose estimation. Unlike existing fusion methods, the proposed DFTr can better model cross-modality semantic correlation by leveraging their semantic similarity, such that globally enhanced features from different modalities can be better integrated for improved information extraction. Moreover, to further improve robustness and efficiency, we introduce a novel weighted vector-wise voting algorithm that employs a non-iterative global optimization strategy for precise 3D keypoint localization while achieving near real-time inference. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and strong generalization capability of our proposed 3D keypoint voting algorithm. Results on four widely used benchmarks also demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.
Recent works on 6D object pose estimation focus on learning keypoint correspondences between images and object models, and then determine the object pose through RANSAC-based algorithms or by directly regressing the pose with end-to-end optimisations. We argue that learning point-level discriminative features is overlooked in the literature. To this end, we revisit Fully Convolutional Geometric Features (FCGF) and tailor it for object 6D pose estimation to achieve state-of-the-art performance. FCGF employs sparse convolutions and learns point-level features using a fully-convolutional network by optimising a hardest contrastive loss. We can outperform recent competitors on popular benchmarks by adopting key modifications to the loss and to the input data representations, by carefully tuning the training strategies, and by employing data augmentations suitable for the underlying problem. We carry out a thorough ablation to study the contribution of each modification. The code is available at https://github.com/jcorsetti/FCGF6D.
Detecting objects and estimating their 6D poses is essential for automated systems to interact safely with the environment. Most 6D pose estimators, however, rely on a single camera frame and suffer from occlusions and ambiguities due to object symmetries. We overcome this issue by presenting a novel symmetry-aware multi-view 6D pose estimator called SyMFM6D. Our approach efficiently fuses the RGB-D frames from multiple perspectives in a deep multi-directional fusion network and predicts predefined keypoints for all objects in the scene simultaneously. Based on the keypoints and an instance semantic segmentation, we efficiently compute the 6D poses by least-squares fitting. To address the ambiguity issues for symmetric objects, we propose a novel training procedure for symmetry-aware keypoint detection including a new objective function. Our SyMFM6D network significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in both single-view and multi-view 6D pose estimation. We furthermore show the effectiveness of our symmetry-aware training procedure and demonstrate that our approach is robust towards inaccurate camera calibration and dynamic camera setups.
Most recent 6D object pose methods use 2D optical flow to refine their results. However, the general optical flow methods typically do not consider the target's 3D shape information during matching, making them less effective in 6D object pose estimation. In this work, we propose a shape-constraint recurrent matching framework for 6D object pose estimation. We first compute a pose-induced flow based on the displacement of 2D reprojection between the initial pose and the currently estimated pose, which embeds the target's 3D shape implicitly. Then we use this pose-induced flow to construct the correlation map for the following matching iterations, which reduces the matching space significantly and is much easier to learn. Furthermore, we use networks to learn the object pose based on the current estimated flow, which facilitates the computation of the pose-induced flow for the next iteration and yields an end-to-end system for object pose. Finally, we optimize the optical flow and object pose simultaneously in a recurrent manner. We evaluate our method on three challenging 6D object pose datasets and show that it outperforms the state of the art significantly in both accuracy and efficiency.
Addressing pose ambiguity in 6D object pose estimation from single RGB images presents a significant challenge, particularly due to object symmetries or occlusions. In response, we introduce a novel score-based diffusion method applied to the $SE(3)$ group, marking the first application of diffusion models to $SE(3)$ within the image domain, specifically tailored for pose estimation tasks. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the method's efficacy in handling pose ambiguity, mitigating perspective-induced ambiguity, and showcasing the robustness of our surrogate Stein score formulation on $SE(3)$. This formulation not only improves the convergence of denoising process but also enhances computational efficiency. Thus, we pioneer a promising strategy for 6D object pose estimation.
Locating 3D objects from a single RGB image via Perspective-n-Point (PnP) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Driven by end-to-end deep learning, recent studies suggest interpreting PnP as a differentiable layer, allowing for partial learning of 2D-3D point correspondences by backpropagating the gradients of pose loss. Yet, learning the entire correspondences from scratch is highly challenging, particularly for ambiguous pose solutions, where the globally optimal pose is theoretically non-differentiable w.r.t. the points. In this paper, we propose the EPro-PnP, a probabilistic PnP layer for general end-to-end pose estimation, which outputs a distribution of pose with differentiable probability density on the SE(3) manifold. The 2D-3D coordinates and corresponding weights are treated as intermediate variables learned by minimizing the KL divergence between the predicted and target pose distribution. The underlying principle generalizes previous approaches, and resembles the attention mechanism. EPro-PnP can enhance existing correspondence networks, closing the gap between PnP-based method and the task-specific leaders on the LineMOD 6DoF pose estimation benchmark. Furthermore, EPro-PnP helps to explore new possibilities of network design, as we demonstrate a novel deformable correspondence network with the state-of-the-art pose accuracy on the nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/tjiiv-cprg/EPro-PnP-v2.