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.
Accurate 6D pose estimation is key for robotic manipulation, enabling precise object localization for tasks like grasping. We present RAG-6DPose, a retrieval-augmented approach that leverages 3D CAD models as a knowledge base by integrating both visual and geometric cues. Our RAG-6DPose roughly contains three stages: 1) Building a Multi-Modal CAD Knowledge Base by extracting 2D visual features from multi-view CAD rendered images and also attaching 3D points; 2) Retrieving relevant CAD features from the knowledge base based on the current query image via our ReSPC module; and 3) Incorporating retrieved CAD information to refine pose predictions via retrieval-augmented decoding. Experimental results on standard benchmarks and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, particularly in handling occlusions and novel viewpoints. Supplementary material is available on our project website: https://sressers.github.io/RAG-6DPose .
We introduce a robust framework, RGBTrack, for real-time 6D pose estimation and tracking that operates solely on RGB data, thereby eliminating the need for depth input for such dynamic and precise object pose tracking tasks. Building on the FoundationPose architecture, we devise a novel binary search strategy combined with a render-and-compare mechanism to efficiently infer depth and generate robust pose hypotheses from true-scale CAD models. To maintain stable tracking in dynamic scenarios, including rapid movements and occlusions, RGBTrack integrates state-of-the-art 2D object tracking (XMem) with a Kalman filter and a state machine for proactive object pose recovery. In addition, RGBTrack's scale recovery module dynamically adapts CAD models of unknown scale using an initial depth estimate, enabling seamless integration with modern generative reconstruction techniques. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that RGBTrack's novel depth-free approach achieves competitive accuracy and real-time performance, making it a promising practical solution candidate for application areas including robotics, augmented reality, and computer vision. The source code for our implementation will be made publicly available at https://github.com/GreatenAnoymous/RGBTrack.git.
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is a prerequisite for successfully completing robotic prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation tasks. At present, 6D pose estimation for robotic manipulation generally relies on depth sensors based on, e.g., structured light, time-of-flight, and stereo-vision, which can be expensive, produce noisy output (as compared with RGB cameras), and fail to handle transparent objects. On the other hand, state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models (MDEMs) provide only affine-invariant depths up to an unknown scale and shift. Metric MDEMs achieve some successful zero-shot results on public datasets, but fail to generalize. We propose a novel framework, Monocular One-shot Metric-depth Alignment (MOMA), to recover metric depth from a single RGB image, through a one-shot adaptation building on MDEM techniques. MOMA performs scale-rotation-shift alignments during camera calibration, guided by sparse ground-truth depth points, enabling accurate depth estimation without additional data collection or model retraining on the testing setup. MOMA supports fine-tuning the MDEM on transparent objects, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities. Real-world experiments on tabletop 2-finger grasping and suction-based bin-picking applications show MOMA achieves high success rates in diverse tasks, confirming its effectiveness.
This paper addresses the problem of category-level pose estimation for articulated objects in robotic manipulation tasks. Recent works have shown promising results in estimating part pose and size at the category level. However, these approaches primarily follow a complex multi-stage pipeline that first segments part instances in the point cloud and then estimates the Normalized Part Coordinate Space (NPCS) representation for 6D poses. These approaches suffer from high computational costs and low performance in real-time robotic tasks. To address these limitations, we propose YOEO, a single-stage method that simultaneously outputs instance segmentation and NPCS representations in an end-to-end manner. We use a unified network to generate point-wise semantic labels and centroid offsets, allowing points from the same part instance to vote for the same centroid. We further utilize a clustering algorithm to distinguish points based on their estimated centroid distances. Finally, we first separate the NPCS region of each instance. Then, we align the separated regions with the real point cloud to recover the final pose and size. Experimental results on the GAPart dataset demonstrate the pose estimation capabilities of our proposed single-shot method. We also deploy our synthetically-trained model in a real-world setting, providing real-time visual feedback at 200Hz, enabling a physical Kinova robot to interact with unseen articulated objects. This showcases the utility and effectiveness of our proposed method.
Accurate 6D pose estimation of complex objects in 3D environments is essential for effective robotic manipulation. Yet, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating 6D pose estimation methods under realistic industrial conditions, as most datasets focus on household objects in domestic settings, while the few available industrial datasets are limited to artificial setups with objects placed on tables. To bridge this gap, we introduce CHIP, the first dataset designed for 6D pose estimation of chairs manipulated by a robotic arm in a real-world industrial environment. CHIP includes seven distinct chairs captured using three different RGBD sensing technologies and presents unique challenges, such as distractor objects with fine-grained differences and severe occlusions caused by the robotic arm and human operators. CHIP comprises 77,811 RGBD images annotated with ground-truth 6D poses automatically derived from the robot's kinematics, averaging 11,115 annotations per chair. We benchmark CHIP using three zero-shot 6D pose estimation methods, assessing performance across different sensor types, localization priors, and occlusion levels. Results show substantial room for improvement, highlighting the unique challenges posed by the dataset. CHIP will be publicly released.
Estimating the 6D pose of objects from RGBD data is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications in robotics and augmented reality. A key challenge is achieving generalization to novel objects that were not seen during training. Most existing approaches address this by scaling up training on synthetic data tailored to the task, a process that demands substantial computational resources. But is task-specific training really necessary for accurate and efficient 6D pose estimation of novel objects? To answer No!, we introduce FreeZeV2, the second generation of FreeZe: a training-free method that achieves strong generalization to unseen objects by leveraging geometric and vision foundation models pre-trained on unrelated data. FreeZeV2 improves both accuracy and efficiency over FreeZe through three key contributions: (i) a sparse feature extraction strategy that reduces inference-time computation without sacrificing accuracy; (ii) a feature-aware scoring mechanism that improves both pose selection during RANSAC-based 3D registration and the final ranking of pose candidates; and (iii) a modular design that supports ensembles of instance segmentation models, increasing robustness to segmentation masks errors. We evaluate FreeZeV2 on the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, where it establishes a new state-of-the-art in 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. When using the same segmentation masks, FreeZeV2 achieves a remarkable 8x speedup over FreeZe while also improving accuracy by 5%. When using ensembles of segmentation models, FreeZeV2 gains an additional 8% in accuracy while still running 2.5x faster than FreeZe. FreeZeV2 was awarded Best Overall Method at the BOP Challenge 2024.
The accurate estimation of 6D pose remains a challenging task within the computer vision domain, even when utilizing 3D point cloud data. Conversely, in the manufacturing domain, instances arise where leveraging prior knowledge can yield advancements in this endeavor. This study focuses on the disassembly of starter motors to augment the engineering of product life cycles. A pivotal objective in this context involves the identification and 6D pose estimation of bolts affixed to the motors, facilitating automated disassembly within the manufacturing workflow. Complicating matters, the presence of occlusions and the limitations of single-view data acquisition, notably when motors are placed in a clamping system, obscure certain portions and render some bolts imperceptible. Consequently, the development of a comprehensive pipeline capable of acquiring complete bolt information is imperative to avoid oversight in bolt detection. In this paper, employing the task of bolt detection within the scope of our project as a pertinent use case, we introduce a meticulously devised pipeline. This multi-stage pipeline effectively captures the 6D information with regard to all bolts on the motor, thereby showcasing the effective utilization of prior knowledge in handling this challenging task. The proposed methodology not only contributes to the field of 6D pose estimation but also underscores the viability of integrating domain-specific insights to tackle complex problems in manufacturing and automation.
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is essential for robotic grasping and manipulation, particularly in agriculture, where fruits and vegetables exhibit high intra-class variability in shape, size, and texture. The vast majority of existing methods rely on instance-specific CAD models or require depth sensors to resolve geometric ambiguities, making them impractical for real-world agricultural applications. In this work, we introduce PLANTPose, a novel framework for category-level 6D pose estimation that operates purely on RGB input. PLANTPose predicts both the 6D pose and deformation parameters relative to a base mesh, allowing a single category-level CAD model to adapt to unseen instances. This enables accurate pose estimation across varying shapes without relying on instance-specific data. To enhance realism and improve generalization, we also leverage Stable Diffusion to refine synthetic training images with realistic texturing, mimicking variations due to ripeness and environmental factors and bridging the domain gap between synthetic data and the real world. Our evaluations on a challenging benchmark that includes bananas of various shapes, sizes, and ripeness status demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in handling large intraclass variations while maintaining accurate 6D pose predictions, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art RGB-based approach MegaPose.
Mobile robots are reaching unprecedented speeds, with platforms like Unitree B2, and Fraunhofer O3dyn achieving maximum speeds between 5 and 10 m/s. However, effectively utilizing such speeds remains a challenge due to the limitations of RGB cameras, which suffer from motion blur and fail to provide real-time responsiveness. Event cameras, with their asynchronous operation, and low-latency sensing, offer a promising alternative for high-speed robotic perception. In this work, we introduce MTevent, a dataset designed for 6D pose estimation and moving object detection in highly dynamic environments with large detection distances. Our setup consists of a stereo-event camera and an RGB camera, capturing 75 scenes, each on average 16 seconds, and featuring 16 unique objects under challenging conditions such as extreme viewing angles, varying lighting, and occlusions. MTevent is the first dataset to combine high-speed motion, long-range perception, and real-world object interactions, making it a valuable resource for advancing event-based vision in robotics. To establish a baseline, we evaluate the task of 6D pose estimation using NVIDIA's FoundationPose on RGB images, achieving an Average Recall of 0.22 with ground-truth masks, highlighting the limitations of RGB-based approaches in such dynamic settings. With MTevent, we provide a novel resource to improve perception models and foster further research in high-speed robotic vision. The dataset is available for download https://huggingface.co/datasets/anas-gouda/MTevent
Estimating the 6D pose of unseen objects from monocular RGB images remains a challenging problem, especially due to the lack of prior object-specific knowledge. To tackle this issue, we propose RefPose, an innovative approach to object pose estimation that leverages a reference image and geometric correspondence as guidance. RefPose first predicts an initial pose by using object templates to render the reference image and establish the geometric correspondence needed for the refinement stage. During the refinement stage, RefPose estimates the geometric correspondence of the query based on the generated references and iteratively refines the pose through a render-and-compare approach. To enhance this estimation, we introduce a correlation volume-guided attention mechanism that effectively captures correlations between the query and reference images. Unlike traditional methods that depend on pre-defined object models, RefPose dynamically adapts to new object shapes by leveraging a reference image and geometric correspondence. This results in robust performance across previously unseen objects. Extensive evaluation on the BOP benchmark datasets shows that RefPose achieves state-of-the-art results while maintaining a competitive runtime.
6D object pose estimation remains challenging for many applications due to dependencies on complete 3D models, multi-view images, or training limited to specific object categories. These requirements make generalization to novel objects difficult for which neither 3D models nor multi-view images may be available. To address this, we propose a novel method One2Any that estimates the relative 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) object pose using only a single reference-single query RGB-D image, without prior knowledge of its 3D model, multi-view data, or category constraints. We treat object pose estimation as an encoding-decoding process, first, we obtain a comprehensive Reference Object Pose Embedding (ROPE) that encodes an object shape, orientation, and texture from a single reference view. Using this embedding, a U-Net-based pose decoding module produces Reference Object Coordinate (ROC) for new views, enabling fast and accurate pose estimation. This simple encoding-decoding framework allows our model to be trained on any pair-wise pose data, enabling large-scale training and demonstrating great scalability. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model generalizes well to novel objects, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness even rivaling methods that require multi-view or CAD inputs, at a fraction of compute.
Object pose estimation enables a variety of tasks in computer vision and robotics, including scene understanding and robotic grasping. The complexity of a pose estimation task depends on the unknown variables related to the target object. While instance-level methods already excel for opaque and Lambertian objects, category-level and open-set methods, where texture, shape, and size are partially or entirely unknown, still struggle with these basic material properties. Since texture is unknown in these scenarios, it cannot be used for disambiguating object symmetries, another core challenge of 6D object pose estimation. The complexity of estimating 6D poses with such a manifold of unknowns led to various datasets, accuracy metrics, and algorithmic solutions. This paper compares datasets, accuracy metrics, and algorithms for solving 6D pose estimation on the category-level. Based on this comparison, we analyze how to bridge category-level and open-set object pose estimation to reach generalization and provide actionable recommendations.
Accurate dietary monitoring is essential for promoting healthier eating habits. A key area of research is how people interact and consume food using utensils and hands. By tracking their position and orientation, it is possible to estimate the volume of food being consumed, or monitor eating behaviours, highly useful insights into nutritional intake that can be more reliable than popular methods such as self-reporting. Hence, this paper implements a system that analyzes stationary video feed of people eating, using 6D pose estimation to track hand and spoon movements to capture spatial position and orientation. In doing so, we examine the performance of two state-of-the-art (SOTA) video object segmentation (VOS) models, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and identify main sources of error within the system.
Accurate 6D pose estimation has gained more attention over the years for robotics-assisted tasks that require precise interaction with physical objects. This paper presents an interactive 3D-to-2D visualization and annotation tool to support the 6D pose estimation research community. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed work is the first tool that allows users to visualize and manipulate 3D objects interactively on a 2D real-world scene, along with a comprehensive user study. This system supports robust 6D camera pose annotation by providing both visual cues and spatial relationships to determine object position and orientation in various environments. The annotation feature in Vision6D is particularly helpful in scenarios where the transformation matrix between the camera and world objects is unknown, as it enables accurate annotation of these objects' poses using only the camera intrinsic matrix. This capability serves as a foundational step in developing and training advanced pose estimation models across various domains. We evaluate Vision6D's effectiveness by utilizing widely-used open-source pose estimation datasets Linemod and HANDAL through comparisons between the default ground-truth camera poses with manual annotations. A user study was performed to show that Vision6D generates accurate pose annotations via visual cues in an intuitive 3D user interface. This approach aims to bridge the gap between 2D scene projections and 3D scenes, offering an effective way for researchers and developers to solve 6D pose annotation related problems. The software is open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/InteractiveGL/vision6D.
Object 6D pose estimation is a critical challenge in robotics, particularly for manipulation tasks. While prior research combining visual and tactile (visuotactile) information has shown promise, these approaches often struggle with generalization due to the limited availability of visuotactile data. In this paper, we introduce ViTa-Zero, a zero-shot visuotactile pose estimation framework. Our key innovation lies in leveraging a visual model as its backbone and performing feasibility checking and test-time optimization based on physical constraints derived from tactile and proprioceptive observations. Specifically, we model the gripper-object interaction as a spring-mass system, where tactile sensors induce attractive forces, and proprioception generates repulsive forces. We validate our framework through experiments on a real-world robot setup, demonstrating its effectiveness across representative visual backbones and manipulation scenarios, including grasping, object picking, and bimanual handover. Compared to the visual models, our approach overcomes some drastic failure modes while tracking the in-hand object pose. In our experiments, our approach shows an average increase of 55% in AUC of ADD-S and 60% in ADD, along with an 80% lower position error compared to FoundationPose.
Category-level 3D/6D pose estimation is a crucial step towards comprehensive 3D scene understanding, which would enable a broad range of applications in robotics and embodied AI. Recent works explored neural mesh models that approach a range of 2D and 3D tasks from an analysis-by-synthesis perspective. Despite the largely enhanced robustness to partial occlusion and domain shifts, these methods depended heavily on 3D annotations for part-contrastive learning, which confines them to a narrow set of categories and hinders efficient scaling. In this work, we present DINeMo, a novel neural mesh model that is trained with no 3D annotations by leveraging pseudo-correspondence obtained from large visual foundation models. We adopt a bidirectional pseudo-correspondence generation method, which produce pseudo correspondence utilize both local appearance features and global context information. Experimental results on car datasets demonstrate that our DINeMo outperforms previous zero- and few-shot 3D pose estimation by a wide margin, narrowing the gap with fully-supervised methods by 67.3%. Our DINeMo also scales effectively and efficiently when incorporating more unlabeled images during training, which demonstrate the advantages over supervised learning methods that rely on 3D annotations. Our project page is available at https://analysis-by-synthesis.github.io/DINeMo/.
We introduce Any6D, a model-free framework for 6D object pose estimation that requires only a single RGB-D anchor image to estimate both the 6D pose and size of unknown objects in novel scenes. Unlike existing methods that rely on textured 3D models or multiple viewpoints, Any6D leverages a joint object alignment process to enhance 2D-3D alignment and metric scale estimation for improved pose accuracy. Our approach integrates a render-and-compare strategy to generate and refine pose hypotheses, enabling robust performance in scenarios with occlusions, non-overlapping views, diverse lighting conditions, and large cross-environment variations. We evaluate our method on five challenging datasets: REAL275, Toyota-Light, HO3D, YCBINEOAT, and LM-O, demonstrating its effectiveness in significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods for novel object pose estimation. Project page: https://taeyeop.com/any6d
Three-dimensional local descriptors are crucial for encoding geometric surface properties, making them essential for various point cloud understanding tasks. Among these descriptors, GeDi has demonstrated strong zero-shot 6D pose estimation capabilities but remains computationally impractical for real-world applications due to its expensive inference process. Can we retain GeDi's effectiveness while significantly improving its efficiency? In this paper, we explore this question by introducing a knowledge distillation framework that trains an efficient student model to regress local descriptors from a GeDi teacher. Our key contributions include: an efficient large-scale training procedure that ensures robustness to occlusions and partial observations while operating under compute and storage constraints, and a novel loss formulation that handles weak supervision from non-distinctive teacher descriptors. We validate our approach on five BOP Benchmark datasets and demonstrate a significant reduction in inference time while maintaining competitive performance with existing methods, bringing zero-shot 6D pose estimation closer to real-time feasibility. Project Website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/dGeDi/
Accurate transformation estimation between camera space and robot space is essential. Traditional methods using markers for hand-eye calibration require offline image collection, limiting their suitability for online self-calibration. Recent learning-based robot pose estimation methods, while advancing online calibration, struggle with cross-robot generalization and require the robot to be fully visible. This work proposes a Foundation feature-driven online End-Effector Pose Estimation (FEEPE) algorithm, characterized by its training-free and cross end-effector generalization capabilities. Inspired by the zero-shot generalization capabilities of foundation models, FEEPE leverages pre-trained visual features to estimate 2D-3D correspondences derived from the CAD model and target image, enabling 6D pose estimation via the PnP algorithm. To resolve ambiguities from partial observations and symmetry, a multi-historical key frame enhanced pose optimization algorithm is introduced, utilizing temporal information for improved accuracy. Compared to traditional hand-eye calibration, FEEPE enables marker-free online calibration. Unlike robot pose estimation, it generalizes across robots and end-effectors in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior flexibility, generalization, and performance.