We study the problem of aligning two sets of 3D geometric primitives given known correspondences. Our first contribution is to show that this primitive alignment framework unifies five perception problems including point cloud registration, primitive (mesh) registration, category-level 3D registration, absolution pose estimation (APE), and category-level APE. Our second contribution is to propose DynAMical Pose estimation (DAMP), the first general and practical algorithm to solve primitive alignment problem by simulating rigid body dynamics arising from virtual springs and damping, where the springs span the shortest distances between corresponding primitives. We evaluate DAMP in simulated and real datasets across all five problems, and demonstrate (i) DAMP always converges to the globally optimal solution in the first three problems with 3D-3D correspondences; (ii) although DAMP sometimes converges to suboptimal solutions in the last two problems with 2D-3D correspondences, using a scheme for escaping local minima, DAMP always succeeds. Our third contribution is to demystify the surprising empirical performance of DAMP and formally prove a global convergence result in the case of point cloud registration by charactering local stability of the equilibrium points of the underlying dynamical system.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；State Key Lab of Intelligent Technologies and Systems（智能技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Humans are able to perform fast and accurate object pose estimation even under severe occlusion by exploiting learned object model priors from everyday life. However, most recently proposed pose estimation algorithms neglect to utilize the information of object models, often end up with limited accuracy, and tend to fall short in cluttered scenes. In this paper, we present a novel learning-based model, \underline{P}ose-Guided \underline{P}oint Cloud \underline{G}enerating Networks for 6D Object Pose Estimation (P$^2$GNet), designed to effectively exploit object model priors to facilitate 6D ob…
Object pose estimation is a necessary prerequisite for autonomous robotic manipulation, but the presence of symmetry increases the complexity of the pose estimation task. Existing methods for object pose estimation output a single 6D pose. Thus, they lack the ability to reason about symmetries. Lately, modeling object orientation as a non-parametric probability distribution on the SO(3) manifold by neural networks has shown impressive results. However, acquiring large-scale datasets to train pose estimation models remains a bottleneck. To address this limitation, we introduce an automatic pose…
Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；New York University（纽约大学）
One of the key criticisms of deep learning is that large amounts of expensive and difficult-to-acquire training data are required in order to train models with high performance and good generalization capabilities. Focusing on the task of monocular camera pose estimation via scene coordinate regression (SCR), we describe a novel method, Domain Adaptation of Networks for Camera pose Estimation (DANCE), which enables the training of models without access to any labels on the target task. DANCE requires unlabeled images (without known poses, ordering, or scene coordinate labels) and a 3D represen…
Cognitive Systems Group, CS Department \ Karls Universit\"at T\"ubingen, Germany
Bin picking is a core problem in industrial environments and robotics, with its main module as 6D pose estimation. However, industrial depth sensors have a lack of accuracy when it comes to small objects. Therefore, we propose a framework for pose estimation in highly cluttered scenes with small objects, which mainly relies on RGB data and makes use of depth information only for pose refinement. In this work, we compare synthetic data generation approaches for object detection and pose estimation and introduce a pose filtering algorithm that determines the most accurate estimated poses. We wil…
Camera pose estimation in large-scale environments is still an open question and, despite recent promising results, it may still fail in some situations. The research so far has focused on improving subcomponents of estimation pipelines, to achieve more accurate poses. However, there is no guarantee for the result to be correct, even though the correctness of pose estimation is critically important in several visual localization applications,such as in autonomous navigation. In this paper we bring to attention a novel research question, pose confidence estimation,where we aim at quantifying ho…
6D object pose estimation is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous robot manipulation applications. The state-of-the-art models for pose estimation are convolutional neural network (CNN)-based. Lately, Transformers, an architecture originally proposed for natural language processing, is achieving state-of-the-art results in many computer vision tasks as well. Equipped with the multi-head self-attention mechanism, Transformers enable simple single-stage end-to-end architectures for learning object detection and 6D object pose estimation jointly. In this work, we propose YOLOPose (short form for…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）
Recently, 3D input data based hand pose estimation methods have shown state-of-the-art performance, because 3D data capture more spatial information than the depth image. Whereas 3D voxel-based methods need a large amount of memory, PointNet based methods need tedious preprocessing steps such as K-nearest neighbour search for each point. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning hand pose estimation method for an unordered point cloud. Our method takes 1024 3D points as input and does not require additional information. We use Permutation Equivariant Layer (PEL) as the basic element, whe…
Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University（科罗拉多州立大学计算机科学系）
In this paper, we present a novel, end-to-end 6D object pose estimation method that operates on RGB inputs. Our approach is composed of 2 main components: the first component classifies the objects in the input image and proposes an initial 6D pose estimate through a multi-task, CNN-based encoder/multi-decoder module. The second component, a refinement module, includes a renderer and a multi-attentional pose refinement network, which iteratively refines the estimated poses by utilizing both appearance features and flow vectors. Our refiner takes advantage of the hybrid representation of the in…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Dyson Robot Learning Lab（戴森机器人学习实验室）；Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics（香港物流机器人中心）
Most existing methods for category-level pose estimation rely on object point clouds. However, when considering transparent objects, depth cameras are usually not able to capture meaningful data, resulting in point clouds with severe artifacts. Without a high-quality point cloud, existing methods are not applicable to challenging transparent objects. To tackle this problem, we present StereoPose, a novel stereo image framework for category-level object pose estimation, ideally suited for transparent objects. For a robust estimation from pure stereo images, we develop a pipeline that decouples …
The point pair feature (PPF) is widely used for 6D pose estimation. In this paper, we propose an efficient 6D pose estimation method based on the PPF framework. We introduce a well-targeted down-sampling strategy that focuses more on edge area for efficient feature extraction of complex geometry. A pose hypothesis validation approach is proposed to resolve the symmetric ambiguity by calculating edge matching degree. We perform evaluations on two challenging datasets and one real-world collected dataset, demonstrating the superiority of our method on pose estimation of geometrically complex, oc…
We propose a novel camera pose estimation or perspective-n-point (PnP) algorithm, based on the idea of consistency regions and half-space intersections. Our algorithm has linear time-complexity and a squared reconstruction error that decreases at least quadratically, as the number of feature point correspondences increase. Inspired by ideas from triangulation and frame quantisation theory, we define consistent reconstruction and then present SHAPE, our proposed consistent pose estimation algorithm. We compare this algorithm with state-of-the-art pose estimation techniques in terms of accuracy …
We propose a novel image based localization system using graph neural networks (GNN). The pretrained ResNet50 convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is used to extract the important features for each image. Following, the extracted features are input to GNN to find the pose of each image by either using the image features as a node in a graph and formulate the pose estimation problem as node pose regression or modelling the image features themselves as a graph and the problem becomes graph pose regression. We do an extensive comparison between the proposed two approaches and the state…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Google（谷歌）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Category-level object pose estimation aims to predict the 6D pose as well as the 3D metric size of arbitrary objects from a known set of categories. Recent methods harness shape prior adaptation to map the observed point cloud into the canonical space and apply Umeyama algorithm to recover the pose and size. However, their shape prior integration strategy boosts pose estimation indirectly, which leads to insufficient pose-sensitive feature extraction and slow inference speed. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel geometry-guided Residual Object Bounding Box Projection netwo…
University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；Infineon Technologies Austria AG（英飞凌科技奥地利股份公司）
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is an important task for a variety of robotic applications such as grasping or localization. It is a challenging task due to object symmetries, clutter and occlusion, but it becomes more challenging when additional information, such as depth and 3D models, is not provided. We present a transformer-based approach that takes an RGB image as input and predicts a 6D pose for each object in the image. Besides the image, our network does not require any additional information such as depth maps or 3D object models. First, the image is passed through an object detec…
York University（约克大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
We consider the problem of unsupervised camera pose estimation. Given an input video sequence, our goal is to estimate the camera pose (i.e. the camera motion) between consecutive frames. Traditionally, this problem is tackled by placing strict constraints on the transformation vector or by incorporating optical flow through a complex pipeline. We propose an alternative approach that utilizes a compositional re-estimation process for camera pose estimation. Given an input, we first estimate a depth map. Our method then iteratively estimates the camera motion based on the estimated depth map. O…
University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；Semnan University（塞姆南大学）
3D hand pose estimation methods have made significant progress recently. However, the estimation accuracy is often far from sufficient for specific real-world applications, and thus there is significant room for improvement. This paper proposes TriHorn-Net, a novel model that uses specific innovations to improve hand pose estimation accuracy on depth images. The first innovation is the decomposition of the 3D hand pose estimation into the estimation of 2D joint locations in the depth image space (UV), and the estimation of their corresponding depths aided by two complementary attention maps. T…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Category-level object pose estimation aims to find 6D object poses of previously unseen object instances from known categories without access to object CAD models. To reduce the huge amount of pose annotations needed for category-level learning, we propose for the first time a self-supervised learning framework to estimate category-level 6D object pose from single 3D point clouds.During training, our method assumes no ground-truth pose annotations, no CAD models, and no multi-view supervision. The key to our method is to disentangle shape and pose through an invariant shape reconstruction modu…
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University（玛丽亚·居里-斯克沃多夫斯卡大学）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）
In this paper a method for camera pose estimation from a sequence of images is presented. The method assumes camera is calibrated (intrinsic parameters are known) which allows to decrease a number of required pairs of corresponding points compared to uncalibrated case. Our algorithm can be used as a first stage in a structure from motion stereo reconstruction system.
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
This paper addresses the 3D point cloud reconstruction and 3D pose estimation of the human hand from a single RGB image. To that end, we present a novel pipeline for local and global point cloud reconstruction using a 3D hand template while learning a latent representation for pose estimation. To demonstrate our method, we introduce a new multi-view hand posture dataset to obtain complete 3D point clouds of the hand in the real world. Experiments on our newly proposed dataset and four public benchmarks demonstrate the model's strengths. Our method outperforms competitors in 3D pose estimation …
In this paper, we address the challenging task of estimating 6D object pose from a single RGB image. Motivated by the deep learning based object detection methods, we propose a concise and efficient network that integrate 6D object pose parameter estimation into the object detection framework. Furthermore, for more robust estimation to occlusion, a non-local self-attention module is introduced. The experimental results show that the proposed method reaches the state-of-the-art performance on the YCB-video and the Linemod datasets.
In real-world applications the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem should generally be applied in a sequence of images which a set of drift-prone features are tracked over time. In this paper, we consider both the temporal dependency of camera poses and the uncertainty of features for the sequential camera pose estimation. Using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), a priori estimate of the camera pose is calculated from the camera motion model and then corrected by minimizing the reprojection error of the reference points. Experimental results, using both simulated and real data, demonstrate that t…
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
Pose Priors are critical in human pose estimation, since they are able to enforce constraints that prevent estimated poses from tending to physically impossible positions. Human pose generally consists of up to 22 Joint Angles of various segments, and their respective bone lengths, but the way these various segments interact can affect the validity of a pose. Looking at the Knee-Ankle segment alone, we can observe that clearly, the Knee cannot bend forward beyond it's roughly 90 degree point, amongst various other impossible poses below.
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Charles Stark Draper Laboratory（查尔斯·斯塔克·德雷珀实验室）；Dexai Robotics（Dexai Robotics公司（德克赛机器人公司））
In this work, we introduce pose interpreter networks for 6-DoF object pose estimation. In contrast to other CNN-based approaches to pose estimation that require expensively annotated object pose data, our pose interpreter network is trained entirely on synthetic pose data. We use object masks as an intermediate representation to bridge real and synthetic. We show that when combined with a segmentation model trained on RGB images, our synthetically trained pose interpreter network is able to generalize to real data. Our end-to-end system for object pose estimation runs in real-time (20 Hz) on l…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；South Ural State University（南乌拉尔国立大学）
The $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariants of a pose include its rotation angle and screw translation. In this paper, we present a complete comprehensive study of the relative pose estimation problem for a calibrated camera constrained by known $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariant, which involves 5 minimal problems in total. These problems reduces the minimal number of point pairs for relative pose estimation and improves the estimation efficiency and robustness. The $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariant constraints can come from extra sensor measurements or motion assumption. Different from conventional relative pose estima…
This paper presents a comprehensive survey on vision-based robotic grasping. We conclude three key tasks during vision-based robotic grasping, which are object localization, object pose estimation and grasp estimation. In detail, the object localization task contains object localization without classification, object detection and object instance segmentation. This task provides the regions of the target object in the input data. The object pose estimation task mainly refers to estimating the 6D object pose and includes correspondence-based methods, template-based methods and voting-based meth…
We introduce a new method for category-level pose estimation which produces a distribution over predicted poses by integrating 3D shape estimates from a generative object model with segmentation information. Given an input depth-image of an object, our variable-time method uses a mixture density network architecture to produce a multi-modal distribution over 3DOF poses; this distribution is then combined with a prior probability encouraging silhouette agreement between the observed input and predicted object pose. Our approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art in category-…
In this paper, we proposed a pose estimation system based on rendered image training set, which predicts the pose of objects in real image, with knowledge of object category and tight bounding box. We developed a patch-based multi-class classification algorithm, and an iterative approach to improve the accuracy. We achieved state-of-the-art performance on pose estimation task.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
6-DoF object pose estimation from a monocular image is challenging, and a post-refinement procedure is generally needed for high-precision estimation. In this paper, we propose a framework based on a recurrent neural network (RNN) for object pose refinement, which is robust to erroneous initial poses and occlusions. During the recurrent iterations, object pose refinement is formulated as a non-linear least squares problem based on the estimated correspondence field (between a rendered image and the observed image). The problem is then solved by a differentiable Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorit…
We explore 3D human pose estimation from a single RGB image. While many approaches try to directly predict 3D pose from image measurements, we explore a simple architecture that reasons through intermediate 2D pose predictions. Our approach is based on two key observations (1) Deep neural nets have revolutionized 2D pose estimation, producing accurate 2D predictions even for poses with self occlusions. (2) Big-data sets of 3D mocap data are now readily available, making it tempting to lift predicted 2D poses to 3D through simple memorization (e.g., nearest neighbors). The resulting architectur…
This work proposes a novel pose estimation model for object categories that can be effectively transferred to previously unseen environments. The deep convolutional network models (CNN) for pose estimation are typically trained and evaluated on datasets specifically curated for object detection, pose estimation, or 3D reconstruction, which requires large amounts of training data. In this work, we propose a model for pose estimation that can be trained with small amount of data and is built on the top of generic mid-level representations \cite{taskonomy2018} (e.g. surface normal estimation and …
6D object pose estimation is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision and robotics research. While a lot of recent efforts have been made on generalizing pose estimation to novel object instances within the same category, namely category-level 6D pose estimation, it is still restricted in constrained environments given the limited number of annotated data. In this paper, we collect Wild6D, a new unlabeled RGBD object video dataset with diverse instances and backgrounds. We utilize this data to generalize category-level 6D object pose estimation in the wild with semi-supervised learni…
Pose estimation is an important technique for nonverbal human-robot interaction. That said, the presence of a camera in a person's space raises privacy concerns and could lead to distrust of the robot. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving camera-based pose estimation method. The proposed system consists of a user-controlled translucent filter that covers the camera and an image enhancement module designed to facilitate pose estimation from the filtered (shadow) images, while never capturing clear images of the user. We evaluate the system's performance on a new filtered image dataset…
Grasp pose estimation is an important issue for robots to interact with the real world. However, most of existing methods require exact 3D object models available beforehand or a large amount of grasp annotations for training. To avoid these problems, we propose TransGrasp, a category-level grasp pose estimation method that predicts grasp poses of a category of objects by labeling only one object instance. Specifically, we perform grasp pose transfer across a category of objects based on their shape correspondences and propose a grasp pose refinement module to further fine-tune grasp pose of g…
Aalborg University Copenhagen（奥尔堡大学哥本哈根校区）；Lund University（隆德大学）
In the context of future manufacturing lines, removing fixtures will be a fundamental step to increase the flexibility of autonomous systems in assembly and logistic operations. Vision-based 3D pose estimation is a necessity to accurately handle objects that might not be placed at fixed positions during the robot task execution. Industrial tasks bring multiple challenges for the robust pose estimation of objects such as difficult object properties, tight cycle times and constraints on camera views. In particular, when interacting with objects, we have to work with close-range partial views of …
Autonomous robotic systems operating in human environments must understand their surroundings to make accurate and safe decisions. In crowded human scenes with close-up human-robot interaction and robot navigation, a deep understanding requires reasoning about human motion and body dynamics over time with human body pose estimation and tracking. However, existing datasets either do not provide pose annotations or include scene types unrelated to robotic applications. Many datasets also lack the diversity of poses and occlusions found in crowded human scenes. To address this limitation we intro…
NVIDIA Research（英伟达研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Estimating the 6D pose of known objects is important for robots to interact with the real world. The problem is challenging due to the variety of objects as well as the complexity of a scene caused by clutter and occlusions between objects. In this work, we introduce PoseCNN, a new Convolutional Neural Network for 6D object pose estimation. PoseCNN estimates the 3D translation of an object by localizing its center in the image and predicting its distance from the camera. The 3D rotation of the object is estimated by regressing to a quaternion representation. We also introduce a novel loss func…
Transparent objects present multiple distinct challenges to visual perception systems. First, their lack of distinguishing visual features makes transparent objects harder to detect and localize than opaque objects. Even humans find certain transparent surfaces with little specular reflection or refraction, e.g. glass doors, difficult to perceive. A second challenge is that common depth sensors typically used for opaque object perception cannot obtain accurate depth measurements on transparent objects due to their unique reflective properties. Stemming from these challenges, we observe that tr…
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in human pose estimation. Although much work has been done on 2D pose estimation, 3D pose estimation has still been relatively studied less. In this paper, we propose a top-bottom based two-stage 3D estimation framework. GloabalNet and RefineNet in our 2D pose estimation process enable us to find occluded or invisible 2D joints while 2D-to-3D pose estimator composed of residual blocks is used to lift 2D joints to 3D joints effectively. The proposed method achieves promising results with mean per joint position error at 42.39 on the valida…
Hand pose estimation from a single depth image is an essential topic in computer vision and human computer interaction. Despite recent advancements in this area promoted by convolutional neural network, accurate hand pose estimation is still a challenging problem. In this paper we propose a Pose guided structured Region Ensemble Network (Pose-REN) to boost the performance of hand pose estimation. The proposed method extracts regions from the feature maps of convolutional neural network under the guide of an initially estimated pose, generating more optimal and representative features for hand …
We propose a new 2D pose refinement network that learns to predict the human bias in the estimated 2D pose. There are biases in 2D pose estimations that are due to differences between annotations of 2D joint locations based on annotators' perception and those defined by motion capture (MoCap) systems. These biases are crafted into publicly available 2D pose datasets and cannot be removed with existing error reduction approaches. Our proposed pose refinement network allows us to efficiently remove the human bias in the estimated 2D poses and achieve highly accurate multi-view 3D human pose esti…
Human pose estimation in images and videos is one of key technologies for realizing a variety of human activity recognition tasks (e.g., human-computer interaction, gesture recognition, surveillance, and video summarization). This paper presents two types of human pose estimation methodologies; 1) 3D human pose tracking using motion priors and 2) 2D human pose estimation with ensemble modeling.
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；ReLER University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学ReLER）
Compared to 2D object bounding-box labeling, it is very difficult for humans to annotate 3D object poses, especially when depth images of scenes are unavailable. This paper investigates whether we can estimate the object poses effectively when only RGB images and 2D object annotations are given. To this end, we present a two-step pose estimation framework to attain 6DoF object poses from 2D object bounding-boxes. In the first step, the framework learns to segment objects from real and synthetic data in a weakly-supervised fashion, and the segmentation masks will act as a prior for pose estimat…
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学协同媒体网络创新中心）
3D hand-object pose estimation is an important issue to understand the interaction between human and environment. Current hand-object pose estimation methods require detailed 3D labels, which are expensive and labor-intensive. To tackle the problem of data collection, we propose a semi-supervised 3D hand-object pose estimation method with two key techniques: pose dictionary learning and an object-oriented coordinate system. The proposed pose dictionary learning module can distinguish infeasible poses by reconstruction error, enabling unlabeled data to provide supervision signals. The proposed …
Peking University（北京大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Estimating human pose is an important yet challenging task in multimedia applications. Existing pose estimation libraries target reproducing standard pose estimation algorithms. When it comes to customising these algorithms for real-world applications, none of the existing libraries can offer both the flexibility of developing custom pose estimation algorithms and the high-performance of executing these algorithms on commodity devices. In this paper, we introduce Hyperpose, a novel flexible and high-performance pose estimation library. Hyperpose provides expressive Python APIs that enable deve…
While there has been a success in 2D human pose estimation with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), 3D human pose estimation has not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we tackle the 3D human pose estimation task with end-to-end learning using CNNs. Relative 3D positions between one joint and the other joints are learned via CNNs. The proposed method improves the performance of CNN with two novel ideas. First, we added 2D pose information to estimate a 3D pose from an image by concatenating 2D pose estimation result with the features from an image. Second, we have found that more accurat…
The effectiveness of the approaches to predict 3D poses from 2D poses estimated in each frame of a video has been demonstrated for 3D human pose estimation. However, 2D poses without appearance information of persons have much ambiguity with respect to the joint depths. In this paper, we propose to estimate a 3D pose in each frame of a video and refine it considering temporal information. The proposed approach reduces the ambiguity of the joint depths and improves the 3D pose estimation accuracy.
Multi-person pose estimation plays an important role in many fields. Although previous works have researched a lot on different parts of human pose estimation, full body pose estimation for multi-person still needs further research. Our work has developed an integrated model through knowledge distillation which can estimate full body poses. Trained based on the AlphaPose system and MSCOCO2017 dataset, our model achieves 51.5 mAP on the validation dataset annotated manually by ourselves. Related resources are available at https://esflfei.github.io/esflfei.gethub.io/website.html.
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）
We present a new approach for a single view, image-based object pose estimation. Specifically, the problem of culling false positives among several pose proposal estimates is addressed in this paper. Our proposed approach targets the problem of inaccurate confidence values predicted by CNNs which is used by many current methods to choose a final object pose prediction. We present a network called CullNet, solving this task. CullNet takes pairs of pose masks rendered from a 3D model and cropped regions in the original image as input. This is then used to calibrate the confidence scores of the p…
