Daily Papers

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.

Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC). A fully autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions, sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an approach that leverages multi-view RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th- place in the stowing and picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network, and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at http://apc.cs.princeton.edu/

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. This task carries great importance for fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction. In practice, 3D human pose estimation in real-world settings is a critical initial step in solving this problem. However, the current datasets, often collected under controlled laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of real-world datasets is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, real-world multi-view dataset. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an automated, precise labeling pipeline that allows for large-scale processing efficiently. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is now publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

A key technical challenge in performing 6D object pose estimation from RGB-D image is to fully leverage the two complementary data sources. Prior works either extract information from the RGB image and depth separately or use costly post-processing steps, limiting their performances in highly cluttered scenes and real-time applications. In this work, we present DenseFusion, a generic framework for estimating 6D pose of a set of known objects from RGB-D images. DenseFusion is a heterogeneous architecture that processes the two data sources individually and uses a novel dense fusion network to extract pixel-wise dense feature embedding, from which the pose is estimated. Furthermore, we integrate an end-to-end iterative pose refinement procedure that further improves the pose estimation while achieving near real-time inference. Our experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in two datasets, YCB-Video and LineMOD. We also deploy our proposed method to a real robot to grasp and manipulate objects based on the estimated pose.

We study the 3D object understanding task for manipulating everyday objects with different material properties (diffuse, specular, transparent and mixed). Existing monocular and RGB-D methods suffer from scale ambiguity due to missing or imprecise depth measurements. We present CODERS, a one-stage approach for Category-level Object Detection, pose Estimation and Reconstruction from Stereo images. The base of our pipeline is an implicit stereo matching module that combines stereo image features with 3D position information. Concatenating this presented module and the following transform-decoder architecture leads to end-to-end learning of multiple tasks required by robot manipulation. Our approach significantly outperforms all competing methods in the public TOD dataset. Furthermore, trained on simulated data, CODERS generalize well to unseen category-level object instances in real-world robot manipulation experiments. Our dataset, code, and demos will be available on our project page.

UniT is a novel approach to tactile representation learning, using VQVAE to learn a compact latent space and serve as the tactile representation. It uses tactile images obtained from a single simple object to train the representation with transferability and generalizability. This tactile representation can be zero-shot transferred to various downstream tasks, including perception tasks and manipulation policy learning. Our benchmarking on an in-hand 3D pose estimation task shows that UniT outperforms existing visual and tactile representation learning methods. Additionally, UniT's effectiveness in policy learning is demonstrated across three real-world tasks involving diverse manipulated objects and complex robot-object-environment interactions. Through extensive experimentation, UniT is shown to be a simple-to-train, plug-and-play, yet widely effective method for tactile representation learning. For more details, please refer to our open-source repository https://github.com/ZhengtongXu/UniT and the project website https://zhengtongxu.github.io/unifiedtactile.github.io/.

We develop a system which generates summaries from seniors' indoor-activity videos captured by a social robot to help remote family members know their seniors' daily activities at home. Unlike the traditional video summarization datasets, indoor videos captured from a moving robot poses additional challenges, namely, (i) the video sequences are very long (ii) a significant number of video-frames contain no-subject or with subjects at ill-posed locations and scales (iii) most of the well-posed frames contain highly redundant information. To address this problem, we propose to exploit pose estimation for detecting people in frames. This guides the robot to follow the user and capture effective videos. We use person identification to distinguish a target senior from other people. We also make use of action recognition to analyze seniors' major activities at different moments, and develop a video summarization method to select diverse and representative keyframes as summaries.

Accurate 3D object pose estimation is key to enabling many robotic applications that involve challenging object interactions. In this work, we show that the density field created by a state-of-the-art efficient radiance field reconstruction method is suitable for highly accurate and robust pose estimation for objects with known 3D models, even when they are very small and with challenging reflective surfaces. We present a fully automatic object pose estimation system based on a robot arm with a single wrist-mounted camera, which can scan a scene from scratch, detect and estimate the 6-Degrees of Freedom (DoF) poses of multiple objects within a couple of minutes of operation. Small objects such as bolts and nuts are estimated with accuracy on order of 1mm.

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

This paper introduces PoseLess, a novel framework for robot hand control that eliminates the need for explicit pose estimation by directly mapping 2D images to joint angles using projected representations. Our approach leverages synthetic training data generated through randomized joint configurations, enabling zero-shot generalization to real-world scenarios and cross-morphology transfer from robotic to human hands. By projecting visual inputs and employing a transformer-based decoder, PoseLess achieves robust, low-latency control while addressing challenges such as depth ambiguity and data scarcity. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in joint angle prediction accuracy without relying on any human-labelled dataset.

Enabling robots to understand language instructions and react accordingly to visual perception has been a long-standing goal in the robotics research community. Achieving this goal requires cutting-edge advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics engineering. Thus, this paper mainly investigates the potential of integrating the most recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing visual grounding and robotic grasping system to enhance the effectiveness of the human-robot interaction. We introduce the WALL-E (Embodied Robotic WAiter load lifting with Large Language model) as an example of this integration. The system utilizes the LLM of ChatGPT to summarize the preference object of the users as a target instruction via the multi-round interactive dialogue. The target instruction is then forwarded to a visual grounding system for object pose and size estimation, following which the robot grasps the object accordingly. We deploy this LLM-empowered system on the physical robot to provide a more user-friendly interface for the instruction-guided grasping task. The further experimental results on various real-world scenarios demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed framework. See the project website at: https://star-uu-wang.github.io/WALL-E/

Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision problem with broad applications in augmented reality and robotics. Over the past decade, deep learning models, due to their superior accuracy and robustness, have increasingly supplanted conventional algorithms reliant on engineered point pair features. Nevertheless, several challenges persist in contemporary methods, including their dependency on labeled training data, model compactness, robustness under challenging conditions, and their ability to generalize to novel unseen objects. A recent survey discussing the progress made on different aspects of this area, outstanding challenges, and promising future directions, is missing. To fill this gap, we discuss the recent advances in deep learning-based object pose estimation, covering all three formulations of the problem, i.e., instance-level, category-level, and unseen object pose estimation. Our survey also covers multiple input data modalities, degrees-of-freedom of output poses, object properties, and downstream tasks, providing the readers with a holistic understanding of this field. Additionally, it discusses training paradigms of different domains, inference modes, application areas, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets, as well as reports the performance of current state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks, thereby facilitating the readers in selecting the most suitable method for their application. Finally, the survey identifies key challenges, reviews the prevailing trends along with their pros and cons, and identifies promising directions for future research. We also keep tracing the latest works at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/Awesome-Object-Pose-Estimation.

The practicality of 3D object pose estimation remains limited for many applications due to the need for prior knowledge of a 3D model and a training period for new objects. To address this limitation, we propose an approach that takes a single image of a new object as input and predicts the relative pose of this object in new images without prior knowledge of the object's 3D model and without requiring training time for new objects and categories. We achieve this by training a model to directly predict discriminative embeddings for viewpoints surrounding the object. This prediction is done using a simple U-Net architecture with attention and conditioned on the desired pose, which yields extremely fast inference. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art methods and show it outperforms them both in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/nope

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 function that enables PoseCNN to handle symmetric objects. In addition, we contribute a large scale video dataset for 6D object pose estimation named the YCB-Video dataset. Our dataset provides accurate 6D poses of 21 objects from the YCB dataset observed in 92 videos with 133,827 frames. We conduct extensive experiments on our YCB-Video dataset and the OccludedLINEMOD dataset to show that PoseCNN is highly robust to occlusions, can handle symmetric objects, and provide accurate pose estimation using only color images as input. When using depth data to further refine the poses, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging OccludedLINEMOD dataset. Our code and dataset are available at https://rse-lab.cs.washington.edu/projects/posecnn/.

We present a new self-supervised approach, SelfPose3d, for estimating 3d poses of multiple persons from multiple camera views. Unlike current state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods, our approach does not require any 2d or 3d ground-truth poses and uses only the multi-view input images from a calibrated camera setup and 2d pseudo poses generated from an off-the-shelf 2d human pose estimator. We propose two self-supervised learning objectives: self-supervised person localization in 3d space and self-supervised 3d pose estimation. We achieve self-supervised 3d person localization by training the model on synthetically generated 3d points, serving as 3d person root positions, and on the projected root-heatmaps in all the views. We then model the 3d poses of all the localized persons with a bottleneck representation, map them onto all views obtaining 2d joints, and render them using 2d Gaussian heatmaps in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Afterwards, we use the corresponding 2d joints and heatmaps from the pseudo 2d poses for learning. To alleviate the intrinsic inaccuracy of the pseudo labels, we propose an adaptive supervision attention mechanism to guide the self-supervision. Our experiments and analysis on three public benchmark datasets, including Panoptic, Shelf, and Campus, show the effectiveness of our approach, which is comparable to fully-supervised methods. Code: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SelfPose3D. Video demo: https://youtu.be/GAqhmUIr2E8.

Existing learning-based methods for object pose estimation in RGB images are mostly model-specific or category based. They lack the capability to generalize to new object categories at test time, hence severely hindering their practicability and scalability. Notably, recent attempts have been made to solve this issue, but they still require accurate 3D data of the object surface at both train and test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that can estimate in a single forward pass the pose of objects never seen during training, given minimum input. In contrast to existing state-of-the-art approaches, which rely on task-specific modules, our proposed model is entirely based on a transformer architecture, which can benefit from recently proposed 3D-geometry general pretraining. We conduct extensive experiments and report state-of-the-art one-shot performance on the challenging LINEMOD benchmark. Finally, extensive ablations allow us to determine good practices with this relatively new type of architecture in the field.

Despite the advances in robotics a large proportion of the of parts handling tasks in the automotive industry's internal logistics are not automated but still performed by humans. A key component to competitively automate these processes is a 6D pose estimation that can handle a large number of different parts, is adaptable to new parts with little manual effort, and is sufficiently accurate and robust with respect to industry requirements. In this context, the question arises as to the current status quo with respect to these measures. To address this we built a representative 6D pose estimation pipeline with state-of-the-art components from economically scalable real to synthetic data generation to pose estimators and evaluated it on automotive parts with regards to a realistic sequencing process. We found that using the data generation approaches, the performance of the trained 6D pose estimators are promising, but do not meet industry requirements. We reveal that the reason for this is the inability of the estimators to provide reliable uncertainties for their poses, rather than the ability of to provide sufficiently accurate poses. In this context we further analyzed how RGB- and RGB-D-based approaches compare against this background and show that they are differently vulnerable to the domain gap induced by synthetic data.

This paper contributes a novel and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing hard-to-perceive thin obstacles without assuming access to a map or the full pose estimation of the robot. The proposed solution builds upon a semantically-enhanced Variational Autoencoder that is trained with both real-world and simulated depth images to compress the input data, while preserving semantically-labeled thin obstacles and handling invalid pixels in the depth sensor's output. This compressed representation, in addition to the robot's partial state involving its linear/angular velocities and its attitude are then utilized to train an uncertainty-aware 3D Collision Prediction Network in simulation to predict collision scores for candidate action sequences in a predefined motion primitives library. A set of simulation and experimental studies in cluttered environments with various sizes and types of obstacles, including multiple hard-to-perceive thin objects, were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and compare against an end-to-end trained baseline. The results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed semantically-enhanced deep collision prediction for learning-based autonomous navigation.

We propose a keypoint-based object-level SLAM framework that can provide globally consistent 6DoF pose estimates for symmetric and asymmetric objects alike. To the best of our knowledge, our system is among the first to utilize the camera pose information from SLAM to provide prior knowledge for tracking keypoints on symmetric objects -- ensuring that new measurements are consistent with the current 3D scene. Moreover, our semantic keypoint network is trained to predict the Gaussian covariance for the keypoints that captures the true error of the prediction, and thus is not only useful as a weight for the residuals in the system's optimization problems, but also as a means to detect harmful statistical outliers without choosing a manual threshold. Experiments show that our method provides competitive performance to the state of the art in 6DoF object pose estimation, and at a real-time speed. Our code, pre-trained models, and keypoint labels are available https://github.com/rpng/suo_slam.

We propose a novel transformer-based framework that reconstructs two high fidelity hands from multi-view RGB images. Unlike existing hand pose estimation methods, where one typically trains a deep network to regress hand model parameters from single RGB image, we consider a more challenging problem setting where we directly regress the absolute root poses of two-hands with extended forearm at high resolution from egocentric view. As existing datasets are either infeasible for egocentric viewpoints or lack background variations, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset with diverse scenarios and collect a real dataset from multi-calibrated camera setup to verify our proposed multi-view image feature fusion strategy. To make the reconstruction physically plausible, we propose two strategies: (i) a coarse-to-fine spectral graph convolution decoder to smoothen the meshes during upsampling and (ii) an optimisation-based refinement stage at inference to prevent self-penetrations. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our framework is able to produce realistic two-hand reconstructions and demonstrate the generalisation of synthetic-trained models to real data, as well as real-time AR/VR applications.

We propose CLA-NeRF -- a Category-Level Articulated Neural Radiance Field that can perform view synthesis, part segmentation, and articulated pose estimation. CLA-NeRF is trained at the object category level using no CAD models and no depth, but a set of RGB images with ground truth camera poses and part segments. During inference, it only takes a few RGB views (i.e., few-shot) of an unseen 3D object instance within the known category to infer the object part segmentation and the neural radiance field. Given an articulated pose as input, CLA-NeRF can perform articulation-aware volume rendering to generate the corresponding RGB image at any camera pose. Moreover, the articulated pose of an object can be estimated via inverse rendering. In our experiments, we evaluate the framework across five categories on both synthetic and real-world data. In all cases, our method shows realistic deformation results and accurate articulated pose estimation. We believe that both few-shot articulated object rendering and articulated pose estimation open doors for robots to perceive and interact with unseen articulated objects.

Prior methods that tackle the problem of generalizable object pose estimation highly rely on having dense views of the unseen object. By contrast, we address the scenario where only a single reference view of the object is available. Our goal then is to estimate the relative object pose between this reference view and a query image that depicts the object in a different pose. In this scenario, robust generalization is imperative due to the presence of unseen objects during testing and the large-scale object pose variation between the reference and the query. To this end, we present a new hypothesis-and-verification framework, in which we generate and evaluate multiple pose hypotheses, ultimately selecting the most reliable one as the relative object pose. To measure reliability, we introduce a 3D-aware verification that explicitly applies 3D transformations to the 3D object representations learned from the two input images. Our comprehensive experiments on the Objaverse, LINEMOD, and CO3D datasets evidence the superior accuracy of our approach in relative pose estimation and its robustness in large-scale pose variations, when dealing with unseen objects.

Pose Machines provide a sequential prediction framework for learning rich implicit spatial models. In this work we show a systematic design for how convolutional networks can be incorporated into the pose machine framework for learning image features and image-dependent spatial models for the task of pose estimation. The contribution of this paper is to implicitly model long-range dependencies between variables in structured prediction tasks such as articulated pose estimation. We achieve this by designing a sequential architecture composed of convolutional networks that directly operate on belief maps from previous stages, producing increasingly refined estimates for part locations, without the need for explicit graphical model-style inference. Our approach addresses the characteristic difficulty of vanishing gradients during training by providing a natural learning objective function that enforces intermediate supervision, thereby replenishing back-propagated gradients and conditioning the learning procedure. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and outperform competing methods on standard benchmarks including the MPII, LSP, and FLIC datasets.

We present a method that can recognize new objects and estimate their 3D pose in RGB images even under partial occlusions. Our method requires neither a training phase on these objects nor real images depicting them, only their CAD models. It relies on a small set of training objects to learn local object representations, which allow us to locally match the input image to a set of "templates", rendered images of the CAD models for the new objects. In contrast with the state-of-the-art methods, the new objects on which our method is applied can be very different from the training objects. As a result, we are the first to show generalization without retraining on the LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. Our analysis of the failure modes of previous template-based approaches further confirms the benefits of local features for template matching. We outperform the state-of-the-art template matching methods on the LINEMOD, Occlusion-LINEMOD and T-LESS datasets. Our source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/template-pose

Conventional 2D pose estimation models are constrained by their design to specific object categories. This limits their applicability to predefined objects. To overcome these limitations, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) emerged as a solution. CAPE aims to facilitate keypoint localization for diverse object categories using a unified model, which can generalize from minimal annotated support images. Recent CAPE works have produced object poses based on arbitrary keypoint definitions annotated on a user-provided support image. Our work departs from conventional CAPE methods, which require a support image, by adopting a text-based approach instead of the support image. Specifically, we use a pose-graph, where nodes represent keypoints that are described with text. This representation takes advantage of the abstraction of text descriptions and the structure imposed by the graph. Our approach effectively breaks symmetry, preserves structure, and improves occlusion handling. We validate our novel approach using the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset spanning over 100 categories and 18,000 images. Under a 1-shot setting, our solution achieves a notable performance boost of 1.07\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enrich the dataset by providing text description annotations, further enhancing its utility for future research.

Category-level articulated object pose estimation focuses on the pose estimation of unknown articulated objects within known categories. Despite its significance, this task remains challenging due to the varying shapes and poses of objects, expensive dataset annotation costs, and complex real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised approach that leverages a single-frame point cloud to solve this task. Our model consistently generates reconstruction with a canonical pose and joint state for the entire input object, and it estimates object-level poses that reduce overall pose variance and part-level poses that align each part of the input with its corresponding part of the reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous self-supervised methods and is comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. To assess the performance of our model in real-world scenarios, we also introduce a new real-world articulated object benchmark dataset.

Camera pose estimation is a key step in standard 3D reconstruction pipelines that operate on a dense set of images of a single object or scene. However, methods for pose estimation often fail when only a few images are available because they rely on the ability to robustly identify and match visual features between image pairs. While these methods can work robustly with dense camera views, capturing a large set of images can be time-consuming or impractical. We propose SparsePose for recovering accurate camera poses given a sparse set of wide-baseline images (fewer than 10). The method learns to regress initial camera poses and then iteratively refine them after training on a large-scale dataset of objects (Co3D: Common Objects in 3D). SparsePose significantly outperforms conventional and learning-based baselines in recovering accurate camera rotations and translations. We also demonstrate our pipeline for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction using only 5-9 images of an object.

Unseen object pose estimation methods often rely on CAD models or multiple reference views, making the onboarding stage costly. To simplify reference acquisition, we aim to estimate the unseen object's pose through a single unposed RGB-D reference image. While previous works leverage reference images as pose anchors to limit the range of relative pose, our scenario presents significant challenges since the relative transformation could vary across the entire SE(3) space. Moreover, factors like occlusion, sensor noise, and extreme geometry could result in low viewpoint overlap. To address these challenges, we present a novel approach and benchmark, termed UNOPose, for unseen one-reference-based object pose estimation. Building upon a coarse-to-fine paradigm, UNOPose constructs an SE(3)-invariant reference frame to standardize object representation despite pose and size variations. To alleviate small overlap across viewpoints, we recalibrate the weight of each correspondence based on its predicted likelihood of being within the overlapping region. Evaluated on our proposed benchmark based on the BOP Challenge, UNOPose demonstrates superior performance, significantly outperforming traditional and learning-based methods in the one-reference setting and remaining competitive with CAD-model-based methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/shanice-l/UNOPose.

The two-stage object pose estimation paradigm first detects semantic keypoints on the image and then estimates the 6D pose by minimizing reprojection errors. Despite performing well on standard benchmarks, existing techniques offer no provable guarantees on the quality and uncertainty of the estimation. In this paper, we inject two fundamental changes, namely conformal keypoint detection and geometric uncertainty propagation, into the two-stage paradigm and propose the first pose estimator that endows an estimation with provable and computable worst-case error bounds. On one hand, conformal keypoint detection applies the statistical machinery of inductive conformal prediction to convert heuristic keypoint detections into circular or elliptical prediction sets that cover the groundtruth keypoints with a user-specified marginal probability (e.g., 90%). Geometric uncertainty propagation, on the other, propagates the geometric constraints on the keypoints to the 6D object pose, leading to a Pose UnceRtainty SEt (PURSE) that guarantees coverage of the groundtruth pose with the same probability. The PURSE, however, is a nonconvex set that does not directly lead to estimated poses and uncertainties. Therefore, we develop RANdom SAmple averaGing (RANSAG) to compute an average pose and apply semidefinite relaxation to upper bound the worst-case errors between the average pose and the groundtruth. On the LineMOD Occlusion dataset we demonstrate: (i) the PURSE covers the groundtruth with valid probabilities; (ii) the worst-case error bounds provide correct uncertainty quantification; and (iii) the average pose achieves better or similar accuracy as representative methods based on sparse keypoints.

To enable meaningful robotic manipulation of objects in the real-world, 6D pose estimation is one of the critical aspects. Most existing approaches have difficulties to extend predictions to scenarios where novel object instances are continuously introduced, especially with heavy occlusions. In this work, we propose a few-shot pose estimation (FSPE) approach called SA6D, which uses a self-adaptive segmentation module to identify the novel target object and construct a point cloud model of the target object using only a small number of cluttered reference images. Unlike existing methods, SA6D does not require object-centric reference images or any additional object information, making it a more generalizable and scalable solution across categories. We evaluate SA6D on real-world tabletop object datasets and demonstrate that SA6D outperforms existing FSPE methods, particularly in cluttered scenes with occlusions, while requiring fewer reference images.

Despite the significant progress in six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) object pose estimation, existing methods have limited applicability in real-world scenarios involving embodied agents and downstream 3D vision tasks. These limitations mainly come from the necessity of 3D models, closed-category detection, and a large number of densely annotated support views. To mitigate this issue, we propose a general paradigm for object pose estimation, called Promptable Object Pose Estimation (POPE). The proposed approach POPE enables zero-shot 6DoF object pose estimation for any target object in any scene, while only a single reference is adopted as the support view. To achieve this, POPE leverages the power of the pre-trained large-scale 2D foundation model, employs a framework with hierarchical feature representation and 3D geometry principles. Moreover, it estimates the relative camera pose between object prompts and the target object in new views, enabling both two-view and multi-view 6DoF pose estimation tasks. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that POPE exhibits unrivaled robust performance in zero-shot settings, by achieving a significant reduction in the averaged Median Pose Error by 52.38% and 50.47% on the LINEMOD and OnePose datasets, respectively. We also conduct more challenging testings in causally captured images (see Figure 1), which further demonstrates the robustness of POPE. Project page can be found with https://paulpanwang.github.io/POPE/.

Estimating the pose of an object from a monocular image is an inverse problem fundamental in computer vision. The ill-posed nature of this problem requires incorporating deformation priors to solve it. In practice, many materials do not perceptibly shrink or extend when manipulated, constituting a powerful and well-known prior. Mathematically, this translates to the preservation of the Riemannian metric. Neural networks offer the perfect playground to solve the surface reconstruction problem as they can approximate surfaces with arbitrary precision and allow the computation of differential geometry quantities. This paper presents an approach to inferring continuous deformable surfaces from a sequence of images, which is benchmarked against several techniques and obtains state-of-the-art performance without the need for offline training.

Existing novel object 6D pose estimation methods typically rely on CAD models or dense reference views, which are both difficult to acquire. Using only a single reference view is more scalable, but challenging due to large pose discrepancies and limited geometric and spatial information. To address these issues, we propose a Single-Reference-based novel object 6D (SinRef-6D) pose estimation method. Our key idea is to iteratively establish point-wise alignment in the camera coordinate system based on state space models (SSMs). Specifically, iterative camera-space point-wise alignment can effectively handle large pose discrepancies, while our proposed RGB and Points SSMs can capture long-range dependencies and spatial information from a single view, offering linear complexity and superior spatial modeling capability. Once pre-trained on synthetic data, SinRef-6D can estimate the 6D pose of a novel object using only a single reference view, without requiring retraining or a CAD model. Extensive experiments on six popular datasets and real-world robotic scenes demonstrate that we achieve on-par performance with CAD-based and dense reference view-based methods, despite operating in the more challenging single reference setting. Code will be released at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/SinRef-6D.

We introduce a novel neural volumetric pose feature, termed PoseMap, designed to enhance camera localization by encapsulating the information between images and the associated camera poses. Our framework leverages an Absolute Pose Regression (APR) architecture, together with an augmented NeRF module. This integration not only facilitates the generation of novel views to enrich the training dataset but also enables the learning of effective pose features. Additionally, we extend our architecture for self-supervised online alignment, allowing our method to be used and fine-tuned for unlabelled images within a unified framework. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 14.28% and 20.51% performance gain on average in indoor and outdoor benchmark scenes, outperforming existing APR methods with state-of-the-art accuracy.

6D pose estimation of rigid objects is a long-standing and challenging task in computer vision. Recently, the emergence of deep learning reveals the potential of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to predict reliable 6D poses. Given that direct pose regression networks currently exhibit suboptimal performance, most methods still resort to traditional techniques to varying degrees. For example, top-performing methods often adopt an indirect strategy by first establishing 2D-3D or 3D-3D correspondences followed by applying the RANSAC-based PnP or Kabsch algorithms, and further employing ICP for refinement. Despite the performance enhancement, the integration of traditional techniques makes the networks time-consuming and not end-to-end trainable. Orthogonal to them, this paper introduces a fully learning-based object pose estimator. In this work, we first perform an in-depth investigation of both direct and indirect methods and propose a simple yet effective Geometry-guided Direct Regression Network (GDRN) to learn the 6D pose from monocular images in an end-to-end manner. Afterwards, we introduce a geometry-guided pose refinement module, enhancing pose accuracy when extra depth data is available. Guided by the predicted coordinate map, we build an end-to-end differentiable architecture that establishes robust and accurate 3D-3D correspondences between the observed and rendered RGB-D images to refine the pose. Our enhanced pose estimation pipeline GDRNPP (GDRN Plus Plus) conquered the leaderboard of the BOP Challenge for two consecutive years, becoming the first to surpass all prior methods that relied on traditional techniques in both accuracy and speed. The code and models are available at https://github.com/shanice-l/gdrnpp_bop2022.

We consider the task of learning to estimate human pose in still images. In order to avoid the high cost of full supervision, we propose to use a diverse data set, which consists of two types of annotations: (i) a small number of images are labeled using the expensive ground-truth pose; and (ii) other images are labeled using the inexpensive action label. As action information helps narrow down the pose of a human, we argue that this approach can help reduce the cost of training without significantly affecting the accuracy. To demonstrate this we design a probabilistic framework that employs two distributions: (i) a conditional distribution to model the uncertainty over the human pose given the image and the action; and (ii) a prediction distribution, which provides the pose of an image without using any action information. We jointly estimate the parameters of the two aforementioned distributions by minimizing their dissimilarity coefficient, as measured by a task-specific loss function. During both training and testing, we only require an efficient sampling strategy for both the aforementioned distributions. This allows us to use deep probabilistic networks that are capable of providing accurate pose estimates for previously unseen images. Using the MPII data set, we show that our approach outperforms baseline methods that either do not use the diverse annotations or rely on pointwise estimates of the pose.

We present a method for 3D object detection and pose estimation from a single image. In contrast to current techniques that only regress the 3D orientation of an object, our method first regresses relatively stable 3D object properties using a deep convolutional neural network and then combines these estimates with geometric constraints provided by a 2D object bounding box to produce a complete 3D bounding box. The first network output estimates the 3D object orientation using a novel hybrid discrete-continuous loss, which significantly outperforms the L2 loss. The second output regresses the 3D object dimensions, which have relatively little variance compared to alternatives and can often be predicted for many object types. These estimates, combined with the geometric constraints on translation imposed by the 2D bounding box, enable us to recover a stable and accurate 3D object pose. We evaluate our method on the challenging KITTI object detection benchmark both on the official metric of 3D orientation estimation and also on the accuracy of the obtained 3D bounding boxes. Although conceptually simple, our method outperforms more complex and computationally expensive approaches that leverage semantic segmentation, instance level segmentation and flat ground priors and sub-category detection. Our discrete-continuous loss also produces state of the art results for 3D viewpoint estimation on the Pascal 3D+ dataset.

Inferring the 3D structure underlying a set of multi-view images typically requires solving two co-dependent tasks -- accurate 3D reconstruction requires precise camera poses, and predicting camera poses relies on (implicitly or explicitly) modeling the underlying 3D. The classical framework of analysis by synthesis casts this inference as a joint optimization seeking to explain the observed pixels, and recent instantiations learn expressive 3D representations (e.g., Neural Fields) with gradient-descent-based pose refinement of initial pose estimates. However, given a sparse set of observed views, the observations may not provide sufficient direct evidence to obtain complete and accurate 3D. Moreover, large errors in pose estimation may not be easily corrected and can further degrade the inferred 3D. To allow robust 3D reconstruction and pose estimation in this challenging setup, we propose SparseAGS, a method that adapts this analysis-by-synthesis approach by: a) including novel-view-synthesis-based generative priors in conjunction with photometric objectives to improve the quality of the inferred 3D, and b) explicitly reasoning about outliers and using a discrete search with a continuous optimization-based strategy to correct them. We validate our framework across real-world and synthetic datasets in combination with several off-the-shelf pose estimation systems as initialization. We find that it significantly improves the base systems' pose accuracy while yielding high-quality 3D reconstructions that outperform the results from current multi-view reconstruction baselines.

Estimating the 6D pose of objects accurately, quickly, and robustly remains a difficult task. However, recent methods for directly regressing poses from RGB images using dense features have achieved state-of-the-art results. Stereo vision, which provides an additional perspective on the object, can help reduce pose ambiguity and occlusion. Moreover, stereo can directly infer the distance of an object, while mono-vision requires internalized knowledge of the object's size. To extend the state-of-the-art in 6D object pose estimation to stereo, we created a BOP compatible stereo version of the YCB-V dataset. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art 6D pose estimation algorithms by utilizing stereo vision and can easily be adopted for other dense feature-based algorithms.

The goal of this paper is to advance the state-of-the-art of articulated pose estimation in scenes with multiple people. To that end we contribute on three fronts. We propose (1) improved body part detectors that generate effective bottom-up proposals for body parts; (2) novel image-conditioned pairwise terms that allow to assemble the proposals into a variable number of consistent body part configurations; and (3) an incremental optimization strategy that explores the search space more efficiently thus leading both to better performance and significant speed-up factors. Evaluation is done on two single-person and two multi-person pose estimation benchmarks. The proposed approach significantly outperforms best known multi-person pose estimation results while demonstrating competitive performance on the task of single person pose estimation. Models and code available at http://pose.mpi-inf.mpg.de

Category-level 3D pose estimation is a fundamentally important problem in computer vision and robotics, e.g. for embodied agents or to train 3D generative models. However, so far methods that estimate the category-level object pose require either large amounts of human annotations, CAD models or input from RGB-D sensors. In contrast, we tackle the problem of learning to estimate the category-level 3D pose only from casually taken object-centric videos without human supervision. We propose a two-step pipeline: First, we introduce a multi-view alignment procedure that determines canonical camera poses across videos with a novel and robust cyclic distance formulation for geometric and appearance matching using reconstructed coarse meshes and DINOv2 features. In a second step, the canonical poses and reconstructed meshes enable us to train a model for 3D pose estimation from a single image. In particular, our model learns to estimate dense correspondences between images and a prototypical 3D template by predicting, for each pixel in a 2D image, a feature vector of the corresponding vertex in the template mesh. We demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines at the unsupervised alignment of object-centric videos by a large margin and provides faithful and robust predictions in-the-wild. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/GenIntel/uns-obj-pose3d.

This paper studies the complex task of simultaneous multi-object 3D reconstruction, 6D pose and size estimation from a single-view RGB-D observation. In contrast to instance-level pose estimation, we focus on a more challenging problem where CAD models are not available at inference time. Existing approaches mainly follow a complex multi-stage pipeline which first localizes and detects each object instance in the image and then regresses to either their 3D meshes or 6D poses. These approaches suffer from high-computational cost and low performance in complex multi-object scenarios, where occlusions can be present. Hence, we present a simple one-stage approach to predict both the 3D shape and estimate the 6D pose and size jointly in a bounding-box free manner. In particular, our method treats object instances as spatial centers where each center denotes the complete shape of an object along with its 6D pose and size. Through this per-pixel representation, our approach can reconstruct in real-time (40 FPS) multiple novel object instances and predict their 6D pose and sizes in a single-forward pass. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms all shape completion and categorical 6D pose and size estimation baselines on multi-object ShapeNet and NOCS datasets respectively with a 12.6% absolute improvement in mAP for 6D pose for novel real-world object instances.

While much progress has been made on the task of 3D point cloud registration, there still exists no learning-based method able to estimate the 6D pose of an object observed by a 2.5D sensor in a scene. The challenges of this scenario include the fact that most measurements are outliers depicting the object's surrounding context, and the mismatch between the complete 3D object model and its self-occluded observations. We introduce the first deep learning framework capable of effectively handling this scenario. Our method consists of an instance segmentation module followed by a pose estimation one. It allows us to perform 3D registration in a one-shot manner, without requiring an expensive iterative procedure. We further develop an on-the-fly rendering-based training strategy that is both time- and memory-efficient. Our experiments evidence the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art traditional and learning-based 3D registration methods.

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to understand and execute complex manipulation tasks by interpreting abstract instruction manuals. For robots, however, this capability remains a substantial challenge, as they cannot interpret abstract instructions and translate them into executable actions. In this paper, we present Manual2Skill, a novel framework that enables robots to perform complex assembly tasks guided by high-level manual instructions. Our approach leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract structured information from instructional images and then uses this information to construct hierarchical assembly graphs. These graphs represent parts, subassemblies, and the relationships between them. To facilitate task execution, a pose estimation model predicts the relative 6D poses of components at each assembly step. At the same time, a motion planning module generates actionable sequences for real-world robotic implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Manual2Skill by successfully assembling several real-world IKEA furniture items. This application highlights its ability to manage long-horizon manipulation tasks with both efficiency and precision, significantly enhancing the practicality of robot learning from instruction manuals. This work marks a step forward in advancing robotic systems capable of understanding and executing complex manipulation tasks in a manner akin to human capabilities.

Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods achieve remarkable results. However, current HPS benchmarks are mostly designed to test models in scenarios that are similar to the training data. This can lead to critical situations in real-world applications when the observed data differs significantly from the training data and hence is out-of-distribution (OOD). It is therefore important to test and improve the OOD robustness of HPS methods. To address this fundamental problem, we develop a simulator that can be controlled in a fine-grained manner using interpretable parameters to explore the manifold of images of human pose, e.g. by varying poses, shapes, and clothes. We introduce a learning-based testing method, termed PoseExaminer, that automatically diagnoses HPS algorithms by searching over the parameter space of human pose images to find the failure modes. Our strategy for exploring this high-dimensional parameter space is a multi-agent reinforcement learning system, in which the agents collaborate to explore different parts of the parameter space. We show that our PoseExaminer discovers a variety of limitations in current state-of-the-art models that are relevant in real-world scenarios but are missed by current benchmarks. For example, it finds large regions of realistic human poses that are not predicted correctly, as well as reduced performance for humans with skinny and corpulent body shapes. In addition, we show that fine-tuning HPS methods by exploiting the failure modes found by PoseExaminer improve their robustness and even their performance on standard benchmarks by a significant margin. The code are available for research purposes.

Estimating relative camera poses between images has been a central problem in computer vision. Methods that find correspondences and solve for the fundamental matrix offer high precision in most cases. Conversely, methods predicting pose directly using neural networks are more robust to limited overlap and can infer absolute translation scale, but at the expense of reduced precision. We show how to combine the best of both methods; our approach yields results that are both precise and robust, while also accurately inferring translation scales. At the heart of our model lies a Transformer that (1) learns to balance between solved and learned pose estimations, and (2) provides a prior to guide a solver. A comprehensive analysis supports our design choices and demonstrates that our method adapts flexibly to various feature extractors and correspondence estimators, showing state-of-the-art performance in 6DoF pose estimation on Matterport3D, InteriorNet, StreetLearn, and Map-free Relocalization.

Pairwise pose estimation from images with little or no overlap is an open challenge in computer vision. Existing methods, even those trained on large-scale datasets, struggle in these scenarios due to the lack of identifiable correspondences or visual overlap. Inspired by the human ability to infer spatial relationships from diverse scenes, we propose a novel approach, InterPose, that leverages the rich priors encoded within pre-trained generative video models. We propose to use a video model to hallucinate intermediate frames between two input images, effectively creating a dense, visual transition, which significantly simplifies the problem of pose estimation. Since current video models can still produce implausible motion or inconsistent geometry, we introduce a self-consistency score that evaluates the consistency of pose predictions from sampled videos. We demonstrate that our approach generalizes among three state-of-the-art video models and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art DUSt3R on four diverse datasets encompassing indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenes. Our findings suggest a promising avenue for improving pose estimation models by leveraging large generative models trained on vast amounts of video data, which is more readily available than 3D data. See our project page for results: https://inter-pose.github.io/.

Bin-picking is a practical and challenging robotic manipulation task, where accurate 6D pose estimation plays a pivotal role. The workpieces in bin-picking are typically textureless and randomly stacked in a bin, which poses a significant challenge to 6D pose estimation. Existing solutions are typically learning-based methods, which require object-specific training. Their efficiency of practical deployment for novel workpieces is highly limited by data collection and model retraining. Zero-shot 6D pose estimation is a potential approach to address the issue of deployment efficiency. Nevertheless, existing zero-shot 6D pose estimation methods are designed to leverage feature matching to establish point-to-point correspondences for pose estimation, which is less effective for workpieces with textureless appearances and ambiguous local regions. In this paper, we propose ZeroBP, a zero-shot pose estimation framework designed specifically for the bin-picking task. ZeroBP learns Position-Aware Correspondence (PAC) between the scene instance and its CAD model, leveraging both local features and global positions to resolve the mismatch issue caused by ambiguous regions with similar shapes and appearances. Extensive experiments on the ROBI dataset demonstrate that ZeroBP outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot pose estimation methods, achieving an improvement of 9.1% in average recall of correct poses.

Previous methods solve feature matching and pose estimation using a two-stage process by first finding matches and then estimating the pose. As they ignore the geometric relationships between the two tasks, they focus on either improving the quality of matches or filtering potential outliers, leading to limited efficiency or accuracy. In contrast, we propose an iterative matching and pose estimation framework (IMP) leveraging the geometric connections between the two tasks: a few good matches are enough for a roughly accurate pose estimation; a roughly accurate pose can be used to guide the matching by providing geometric constraints. To this end, we implement a geometry-aware recurrent attention-based module which jointly outputs sparse matches and camera poses. Specifically, for each iteration, we first implicitly embed geometric information into the module via a pose-consistency loss, allowing it to predict geometry-aware matches progressively. Second, we introduce an efficient IMP, called EIMP, to dynamically discard keypoints without potential matches, avoiding redundant updating and significantly reducing the quadratic time complexity of attention computation in transformers. Experiments on YFCC100m, Scannet, and Aachen Day-Night datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Test-time adaptation methods have been gaining attention recently as a practical solution for addressing source-to-target domain gaps by gradually updating the model without requiring labels on the target data. In this paper, we propose a method of test-time adaptation for category-level object pose estimation called TTA-COPE. We design a pose ensemble approach with a self-training loss using pose-aware confidence. Unlike previous unsupervised domain adaptation methods for category-level object pose estimation, our approach processes the test data in a sequential, online manner, and it does not require access to the source domain at runtime. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pose ensemble and the self-training loss improve category-level object pose performance during test time under both semi-supervised and unsupervised settings. Project page: https://taeyeop.com/ttacope

Estimating the 6D pose of objects unseen during training is highly desirable yet challenging. Zero-shot object 6D pose estimation methods address this challenge by leveraging additional task-specific supervision provided by large-scale, photo-realistic synthetic datasets. However, their performance heavily depends on the quality and diversity of rendered data and they require extensive training. In this work, we show how to tackle the same task but without training on specific data. We propose FreeZe, a novel solution that harnesses the capabilities of pre-trained geometric and vision foundation models. FreeZe leverages 3D geometric descriptors learned from unrelated 3D point clouds and 2D visual features learned from web-scale 2D images to generate discriminative 3D point-level descriptors. We then estimate the 6D pose of unseen objects by 3D registration based on RANSAC. We also introduce a novel algorithm to solve ambiguous cases due to geometrically symmetric objects that is based on visual features. We comprehensively evaluate FreeZe across the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, which include over a hundred 3D objects and 20,000 images captured in various scenarios. FreeZe consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including competitors extensively trained on synthetic 6D pose estimation data. Code will be publicly available at https://andreacaraffa.github.io/freeze.

We present an unsupervised learning framework for the task of monocular depth and camera motion estimation from unstructured video sequences. We achieve this by simultaneously training depth and camera pose estimation networks using the task of view synthesis as the supervisory signal. The networks are thus coupled via the view synthesis objective during training, but can be applied independently at test time. Empirical evaluation on the KITTI dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach: 1) monocular depth performing comparably with supervised methods that use either ground-truth pose or depth for training, and 2) pose estimation performing favorably with established SLAM systems under comparable input settings.

Most learning-based approaches to category-level 6D pose estimation are design around normalized object coordinate space (NOCS). While being successful, NOCS-based methods become inaccurate and less robust when handling objects of a category containing significant intra-category shape variations. This is because the object coordinates induced by global and rigid alignment of objects are semantically incoherent, making the coordinate regression hard to learn and generalize. We propose Semantically-aware Object Coordinate Space (SOCS) built by warping-and-aligning the objects guided by a sparse set of keypoints with semantically meaningful correspondence. SOCS is semantically coherent: Any point on the surface of a object can be mapped to a semantically meaningful location in SOCS, allowing for accurate pose and size estimation under large shape variations. To learn effective coordinate regression to SOCS, we propose a novel multi-scale coordinate-based attention network. Evaluations demonstrate that our method is easy to train, well-generalizing for large intra-category shape variations and robust to inter-object occlusions.

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.

Most modern image-based 6D object pose estimation methods learn to predict 2D-3D correspondences, from which the pose can be obtained using a PnP solver. Because of the non-differentiable nature of common PnP solvers, these methods are supervised via the individual correspondences. To address this, several methods have designed differentiable PnP strategies, thus imposing supervision on the pose obtained after the PnP step. Here, we argue that this conflicts with the averaging nature of the PnP problem, leading to gradients that may encourage the network to degrade the accuracy of individual correspondences. To address this, we derive a loss function that exploits the ground truth pose before solving the PnP problem. Specifically, we linearize the PnP solver around the ground-truth pose and compute the covariance of the resulting pose distribution. We then define our loss based on the diagonal covariance elements, which entails considering the final pose estimate yet not suffering from the PnP averaging issue. Our experiments show that our loss consistently improves the pose estimation accuracy for both dense and sparse correspondence based methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on both Linemod-Occluded and YCB-Video.

In this paper, we study the problem of end-to-end multi-person pose estimation. State-of-the-art solutions adopt the DETR-like framework, and mainly develop the complex decoder, e.g., regarding pose estimation as keypoint box detection and combining with human detection in ED-Pose, hierarchically predicting with pose decoder and joint (keypoint) decoder in PETR. We present a simple yet effective transformer approach, named Group Pose. We simply regard K-keypoint pose estimation as predicting a set of Ntimes K keypoint positions, each from a keypoint query, as well as representing each pose with an instance query for scoring N pose predictions. Motivated by the intuition that the interaction, among across-instance queries of different types, is not directly helpful, we make a simple modification to decoder self-attention. We replace single self-attention over all the Ntimes(K+1) queries with two subsequent group self-attentions: (i) N within-instance self-attention, with each over K keypoint queries and one instance query, and (ii) (K+1) same-type across-instance self-attention, each over N queries of the same type. The resulting decoder removes the interaction among across-instance type-different queries, easing the optimization and thus improving the performance. Experimental results on MS COCO and CrowdPose show that our approach without human box supervision is superior to previous methods with complex decoders, and even is slightly better than ED-Pose that uses human box supervision. https://github.com/Michel-liu/GroupPose-Paddle{rm Paddle} and https://github.com/Michel-liu/GroupPose{rm PyTorch} code are available.

Tracking human object interaction from videos is important to understand human behavior from the rapidly growing stream of video data. Previous video-based methods require predefined object templates while single-image-based methods are template-free but lack temporal consistency. In this paper, we present a method to track human object interaction without any object shape templates. We decompose the 4D tracking problem into per-frame pose tracking and canonical shape optimization. We first apply a single-view reconstruction method to obtain temporally-inconsistent per-frame interaction reconstructions. Then, for the human, we propose an efficient autoencoder to predict SMPL vertices directly from the per-frame reconstructions, introducing temporally consistent correspondence. For the object, we introduce a pose estimator that leverages temporal information to predict smooth object rotations under occlusions. To train our model, we propose a method to generate synthetic interaction videos and synthesize in total 10 hour videos of 8.5k sequences with full 3D ground truth. Experiments on BEHAVE and InterCap show that our method significantly outperforms previous template-based video tracking and single-frame reconstruction methods. Our proposed synthetic video dataset also allows training video-based methods that generalize to real-world videos. Our code and dataset will be publicly released.

We propose FoundPose, a model-based method for 6D pose estimation of unseen objects from a single RGB image. The method can quickly onboard new objects using their 3D models without requiring any object- or task-specific training. In contrast, existing methods typically pre-train on large-scale, task-specific datasets in order to generalize to new objects and to bridge the image-to-model domain gap. We demonstrate that such generalization capabilities can be observed in a recent vision foundation model trained in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, our method estimates the object pose from image-to-model 2D-3D correspondences, which are established by matching patch descriptors from the recent DINOv2 model between the image and pre-rendered object templates. We find that reliable correspondences can be established by kNN matching of patch descriptors from an intermediate DINOv2 layer. Such descriptors carry stronger positional information than descriptors from the last layer, and we show their importance when semantic information is ambiguous due to object symmetries or a lack of texture. To avoid establishing correspondences against all object templates, we develop an efficient template retrieval approach that integrates the patch descriptors into the bag-of-words representation and can promptly propose a handful of similarly looking templates. Additionally, we apply featuremetric alignment to compensate for discrepancies in the 2D-3D correspondences caused by coarse patch sampling. The resulting method noticeably outperforms existing RGB methods for refinement-free pose estimation on the standard BOP benchmark with seven diverse datasets and can be seamlessly combined with an existing render-and-compare refinement method to achieve RGB-only state-of-the-art results. Project page: evinpinar.github.io/foundpose.

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

Traditional 2D pose estimation models are limited by their category-specific design, making them suitable only for predefined object categories. This restriction becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects due to the lack of relevant training data. To address this limitation, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) was introduced. CAPE aims to enable keypoint localization for arbitrary object categories using a single model, requiring minimal support images with annotated keypoints. This approach not only enables object pose generation based on arbitrary keypoint definitions but also significantly reduces the associated costs, paving the way for versatile and adaptable pose estimation applications. We present a novel approach to CAPE that leverages the inherent geometrical relations between keypoints through a newly designed Graph Transformer Decoder. By capturing and incorporating this crucial structural information, our method enhances the accuracy of keypoint localization, marking a significant departure from conventional CAPE techniques that treat keypoints as isolated entities. We validate our approach on the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 images spanning more than 100 categories. Our method outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by substantial margins, achieving remarkable improvements of 2.16% and 1.82% under 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively. Furthermore, our method's end-to-end training demonstrates both scalability and efficiency compared to previous CAPE approaches.

3D pose estimation is an invaluable task in computer vision with various practical applications. Especially, 3D pose estimation for multi-person from a monocular video (3DMPPE) is particularly challenging and is still largely uncharted, far from applying to in-the-wild scenarios yet. We pose three unresolved issues with the existing methods: lack of robustness on unseen views during training, vulnerability to occlusion, and severe jittering in the output. As a remedy, we propose POTR-3D, the first realization of a sequence-to-sequence 2D-to-3D lifting model for 3DMPPE, powered by a novel geometry-aware data augmentation strategy, capable of generating unbounded data with a variety of views while caring about the ground plane and occlusions. Through extensive experiments, we verify that the proposed model and data augmentation robustly generalizes to diverse unseen views, robustly recovers the poses against heavy occlusions, and reliably generates more natural and smoother outputs. The effectiveness of our approach is verified not only by achieving the state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks, but also by qualitative results on more challenging in-the-wild videos. Demo videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/@potr3d.

We consider the problem of source-free unsupervised category-level pose estimation from only RGB images to a target domain without any access to source domain data or 3D annotations during adaptation. Collecting and annotating real-world 3D data and corresponding images is laborious, expensive, yet unavoidable process, since even 3D pose domain adaptation methods require 3D data in the target domain. We introduce 3DUDA, a method capable of adapting to a nuisance-ridden target domain without 3D or depth data. Our key insight stems from the observation that specific object subparts remain stable across out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, enabling strategic utilization of these invariant subcomponents for effective model updates. We represent object categories as simple cuboid meshes, and harness a generative model of neural feature activations modeled at each mesh vertex learnt using differential rendering. We focus on individual locally robust mesh vertex features and iteratively update them based on their proximity to corresponding features in the target domain even when the global pose is not correct. Our model is then trained in an EM fashion, alternating between updating the vertex features and the feature extractor. We show that our method simulates fine-tuning on a global pseudo-labeled dataset under mild assumptions, which converges to the target domain asymptotically. Through extensive empirical validation, including a complex extreme UDA setup which combines real nuisances, synthetic noise, and occlusion, we demonstrate the potency of our simple approach in addressing the domain shift challenge and significantly improving pose estimation accuracy.

We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring cross-category level 6D pose estimation.

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

With the recent advancements in single-image-based human mesh recovery, there is a growing interest in enhancing its performance in certain extreme scenarios, such as occlusion, while maintaining overall model accuracy. Although obtaining accurately annotated 3D human poses under occlusion is challenging, there is still a wealth of rich and precise 2D pose annotations that can be leveraged. However, existing works mostly focus on directly leveraging 2D pose coordinates to estimate 3D pose and mesh. In this paper, we present PostoMETRO(Pose token enhanced MEsh TRansfOrmer), which integrates occlusion-resilient 2D pose representation into transformers in a token-wise manner. Utilizing a specialized pose tokenizer, we efficiently condense 2D pose data to a compact sequence of pose tokens and feed them to the transformer together with the image tokens. This process not only ensures a rich depiction of texture from the image but also fosters a robust integration of pose and image information. Subsequently, these combined tokens are queried by vertex and joint tokens to decode 3D coordinates of mesh vertices and human joints. Facilitated by the robust pose token representation and the effective combination, we are able to produce more precise 3D coordinates, even under extreme scenarios like occlusion. Experiments on both standard and occlusion-specific benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PostoMETRO. Qualitative results further illustrate the clarity of how 2D pose can help 3D reconstruction. Code will be made available.

Estimating the 6-DoF pose of a rigid object from a single RGB image is a crucial yet challenging task. Recent studies have shown the great potential of dense correspondence-based solutions, yet improvements are still needed to reach practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel pose estimation algorithm named CheckerPose, which improves on three main aspects. Firstly, CheckerPose densely samples 3D keypoints from the surface of the 3D object and finds their 2D correspondences progressively in the 2D image. Compared to previous solutions that conduct dense sampling in the image space, our strategy enables the correspondence searching in a 2D grid (i.e., pixel coordinate). Secondly, for our 3D-to-2D correspondence, we design a compact binary code representation for 2D image locations. This representation not only allows for progressive correspondence refinement but also converts the correspondence regression to a more efficient classification problem. Thirdly, we adopt a graph neural network to explicitly model the interactions among the sampled 3D keypoints, further boosting the reliability and accuracy of the correspondences. Together, these novel components make CheckerPose a strong pose estimation algorithm. When evaluated on the popular Linemod, Linemod-O, and YCB-V object pose estimation benchmarks, CheckerPose clearly boosts the accuracy of correspondence-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performances. Code is available at https://github.com/RuyiLian/CheckerPose.

Advances in deep learning recognition have led to accurate object detection with 2D images. However, these 2D perception methods are insufficient for complete 3D world information. Concurrently, advanced 3D shape estimation approaches focus on the shape itself, without considering metric scale. These methods cannot determine the accurate location and orientation of objects. To tackle this problem, we propose a framework that jointly estimates a metric scale shape and pose from a single RGB image. Our framework has two branches: the Metric Scale Object Shape branch (MSOS) and the Normalized Object Coordinate Space branch (NOCS). The MSOS branch estimates the metric scale shape observed in the camera coordinates. The NOCS branch predicts the normalized object coordinate space (NOCS) map and performs similarity transformation with the rendered depth map from a predicted metric scale mesh to obtain 6d pose and size. Additionally, we introduce the Normalized Object Center Estimation (NOCE) to estimate the geometrically aligned distance from the camera to the object center. We validated our method on both synthetic and real-world datasets to evaluate category-level object pose and shape.

We seek to predict the 6 degree-of-freedom (6DoF) pose of a query photograph with respect to a large indoor 3D map. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we develop a new large-scale visual localization method targeted for indoor environments. The method proceeds along three steps: (i) efficient retrieval of candidate poses that ensures scalability to large-scale environments, (ii) pose estimation using dense matching rather than local features to deal with textureless indoor scenes, and (iii) pose verification by virtual view synthesis to cope with significant changes in viewpoint, scene layout, and occluders. Second, we collect a new dataset with reference 6DoF poses for large-scale indoor localization. Query photographs are captured by mobile phones at a different time than the reference 3D map, thus presenting a realistic indoor localization scenario. Third, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art indoor localization approaches on this new challenging data.

While category-level 9DoF object pose estimation has emerged recently, previous correspondence-based or direct regression methods are both limited in accuracy due to the huge intra-category variances in object shape and color, etc. Orthogonal to them, this work presents a category-level object pose and size refiner CATRE, which is able to iteratively enhance pose estimate from point clouds to produce accurate results. Given an initial pose estimate, CATRE predicts a relative transformation between the initial pose and ground truth by means of aligning the partially observed point cloud and an abstract shape prior. In specific, we propose a novel disentangled architecture being aware of the inherent distinctions between rotation and translation/size estimation. Extensive experiments show that our approach remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art methods on REAL275, CAMERA25, and LM benchmarks up to a speed of ~85.32Hz, and achieves competitive results on category-level tracking. We further demonstrate that CATRE can perform pose refinement on unseen category. Code and trained models are available.

Affine correspondences have traditionally been used to improve feature matching over wide baselines. While recent work has successfully used affine correspondences to solve various relative camera pose estimation problems, less attention has been given to their use in absolute pose estimation. We introduce the first general solution to the problem of estimating the pose of a calibrated camera given a single observation of an oriented point and an affine correspondence. The advantage of our approach (P1AC) is that it requires only a single correspondence, in comparison to the traditional point-based approach (P3P), significantly reducing the combinatorics in robust estimation. P1AC provides a general solution that removes restrictive assumptions made in prior work and is applicable to large-scale image-based localization. We propose a minimal solution to the P1AC problem and evaluate our novel solver on synthetic data, showing its numerical stability and performance under various types of noise. On standard image-based localization benchmarks we show that P1AC achieves more accurate results than the widely used P3P algorithm. Code for our method is available at https://github.com/jonathanventura/P1AC/ .

Recent advances in RGBD-based category-level object pose estimation have been limited by their reliance on precise depth information, restricting their broader applicability. In response, RGB-based methods have been developed. Among these methods, geometry-guided pose regression that originated from instance-level tasks has demonstrated strong performance. However, we argue that the NOCS map is an inadequate intermediate representation for geometry-guided pose regression method, as its many-to-one correspondence with category-level pose introduces redundant instance-specific information, resulting in suboptimal results. This paper identifies the intra-class variation problem inherent in pose regression based solely on the NOCS map and proposes the Intra-class Variation-Free Consensus (IVFC) map, a novel coordinate representation generated from the category-level consensus model. By leveraging the complementary strengths of the NOCS map and the IVFC map, we introduce GIVEPose, a framework that implements Gradual Intra-class Variation Elimination for category-level object pose estimation. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GIVEPose significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art RGB-based approaches, achieving substantial improvements in category-level object pose estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziqin-h/GIVEPose.

The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific) robot action policies (e.g., via behavior cloning). While the visual representations do accelerate learning, they are primarily used to encode visual observations. Thus, action information has to be derived purely from robot data, which is expensive to collect! In this work, we present a scalable alternative where the visual representations can help directly infer robot actions. We observe that vision encoders express relationships between image observations as distances (e.g., via embedding dot product) that could be used to efficiently plan robot behavior. We operationalize this insight and develop a simple algorithm for acquiring a distance function and dynamics predictor, by fine-tuning a pre-trained representation on human collected video sequences. The final method is able to substantially outperform traditional robot learning baselines (e.g., 70% success v.s. 50% for behavior cloning on pick-place) on a suite of diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It can also generalize to novel objects, without using any robot demonstrations during train time. For visualizations of the learned policies please check: https://agi-labs.github.io/manipulate-by-seeing/.

We present a fast bottom-up method that jointly detects over 100 keypoints on humans or objects, also referred to as human/object pose estimation. We model all keypoints belonging to a human or an object -- the pose -- as a graph and leverage insights from community detection to quantify the independence of keypoints. We use a graph centrality measure to assign training weights to different parts of a pose. Our proposed measure quantifies how tightly a keypoint is connected to its neighborhood. Our experiments show that our method outperforms all previous methods for human pose estimation with fine-grained keypoint annotations on the face, the hands and the feet with a total of 133 keypoints. We also show that our method generalizes to car poses.

Learning about the three-dimensional world from two-dimensional images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. An ideal neural network architecture for such tasks would leverage the fact that objects can be rotated and translated in three dimensions to make predictions about novel images. However, imposing SO(3)-equivariance on two-dimensional inputs is difficult because the group of three-dimensional rotations does not have a natural action on the two-dimensional plane. Specifically, it is possible that an element of SO(3) will rotate an image out of plane. We show that an algorithm that learns a three-dimensional representation of the world from two dimensional images must satisfy certain geometric consistency properties which we formulate as SO(2)-equivariance constraints. We use the induced and restricted representations of SO(2) on SO(3) to construct and classify architectures which satisfy these geometric consistency constraints. We prove that any architecture which respects said consistency constraints can be realized as an instance of our construction. We show that three previously proposed neural architectures for 3D pose prediction are special cases of our construction. We propose a new algorithm that is a learnable generalization of previously considered methods. We test our architecture on three pose predictions task and achieve SOTA results on both the PASCAL3D+ and SYMSOL pose estimation tasks.

We present the HANDAL dataset for category-level object pose estimation and affordance prediction. Unlike previous datasets, ours is focused on robotics-ready manipulable objects that are of the proper size and shape for functional grasping by robot manipulators, such as pliers, utensils, and screwdrivers. Our annotation process is streamlined, requiring only a single off-the-shelf camera and semi-automated processing, allowing us to produce high-quality 3D annotations without crowd-sourcing. The dataset consists of 308k annotated image frames from 2.2k videos of 212 real-world objects in 17 categories. We focus on hardware and kitchen tool objects to facilitate research in practical scenarios in which a robot manipulator needs to interact with the environment beyond simple pushing or indiscriminate grasping. We outline the usefulness of our dataset for 6-DoF category-level pose+scale estimation and related tasks. We also provide 3D reconstructed meshes of all objects, and we outline some of the bottlenecks to be addressed for democratizing the collection of datasets like this one.

6-DoF pose estimation is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications in augmented reality and robotics. Existing single RGB-based methods often compromise accuracy due to their reliance on initial pose estimates and susceptibility to rotational ambiguity, while approaches requiring depth sensors or multi-view setups incur significant deployment costs. To address these limitations, we introduce SplatPose, a novel framework that synergizes 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with a dual-branch neural architecture to achieve high-precision pose estimation using only a single RGB image. Central to our approach is the Dual-Attention Ray Scoring Network (DARS-Net), which innovatively decouples positional and angular alignment through geometry-domain attention mechanisms, explicitly modeling directional dependencies to mitigate rotational ambiguity. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine optimization pipeline progressively refines pose estimates by aligning dense 2D features between query images and 3DGS-synthesized views, effectively correcting feature misalignment and depth errors from sparse ray sampling. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that SplatPose achieves state-of-the-art 6-DoF pose estimation accuracy in single RGB settings, rivaling approaches that depend on depth or multi-view images.

Training state-of-the-art models for human pose estimation in videos requires datasets with annotations that are really hard and expensive to obtain. Although transformers have been recently utilized for body pose sequence modeling, related methods rely on pseudo-ground truth to augment the currently limited training data available for learning such models. In this paper, we introduce PoseBERT, a transformer module that is fully trained on 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data via masked modeling. It is simple, generic and versatile, as it can be plugged on top of any image-based model to transform it in a video-based model leveraging temporal information. We showcase variants of PoseBERT with different inputs varying from 3D skeleton keypoints to rotations of a 3D parametric model for either the full body (SMPL) or just the hands (MANO). Since PoseBERT training is task agnostic, the model can be applied to several tasks such as pose refinement, future pose prediction or motion completion without finetuning. Our experimental results validate that adding PoseBERT on top of various state-of-the-art pose estimation methods consistently improves their performances, while its low computational cost allows us to use it in a real-time demo for smoothly animating a robotic hand via a webcam. Test code and models are available at https://github.com/naver/posebert.

We introduce UPose3D, a novel approach for multi-view 3D human pose estimation, addressing challenges in accuracy and scalability. Our method advances existing pose estimation frameworks by improving robustness and flexibility without requiring direct 3D annotations. At the core of our method, a pose compiler module refines predictions from a 2D keypoints estimator that operates on a single image by leveraging temporal and cross-view information. Our novel cross-view fusion strategy is scalable to any number of cameras, while our synthetic data generation strategy ensures generalization across diverse actors, scenes, and viewpoints. Finally, UPose3D leverages the prediction uncertainty of both the 2D keypoint estimator and the pose compiler module. This provides robustness to outliers and noisy data, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in out-of-distribution settings. In addition, for in-distribution settings, UPose3D yields performance rivalling methods that rely on 3D annotated data while being the state-of-the-art among methods relying only on 2D supervision.

Are camera poses necessary for multi-view 3D modeling? Existing approaches predominantly assume access to accurate camera poses. While this assumption might hold for dense views, accurately estimating camera poses for sparse views is often elusive. Our analysis reveals that noisy estimated poses lead to degraded performance for existing sparse-view 3D modeling methods. To address this issue, we present LEAP, a novel pose-free approach, therefore challenging the prevailing notion that camera poses are indispensable. LEAP discards pose-based operations and learns geometric knowledge from data. LEAP is equipped with a neural volume, which is shared across scenes and is parameterized to encode geometry and texture priors. For each incoming scene, we update the neural volume by aggregating 2D image features in a feature-similarity-driven manner. The updated neural volume is decoded into the radiance field, enabling novel view synthesis from any viewpoint. On both object-centric and scene-level datasets, we show that LEAP significantly outperforms prior methods when they employ predicted poses from state-of-the-art pose estimators. Notably, LEAP performs on par with prior approaches that use ground-truth poses while running 400times faster than PixelNeRF. We show LEAP generalizes to novel object categories and scenes, and learns knowledge closely resembles epipolar geometry. Project page: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/LEAP/

Robot manipulation relying on learned object-centric descriptors became popular in recent years. Visual descriptors can easily describe manipulation task objectives, they can be learned efficiently using self-supervision, and they can encode actuated and even non-rigid objects. However, learning robust, view-invariant keypoints in a self-supervised approach requires a meticulous data collection approach involving precise calibration and expert supervision. In this paper we introduce Cycle-Correspondence Loss (CCL) for view-invariant dense descriptor learning, which adopts the concept of cycle-consistency, enabling a simple data collection pipeline and training on unpaired RGB camera views. The key idea is to autonomously detect valid pixel correspondences by attempting to use a prediction over a new image to predict the original pixel in the original image, while scaling error terms based on the estimated confidence. Our evaluation shows that we outperform other self-supervised RGB-only methods, and approach performance of supervised methods, both with respect to keypoint tracking as well as for a robot grasping downstream task.

We present a method named iComMa to address the 6D camera pose estimation problem in computer vision. Conventional pose estimation methods typically rely on the target's CAD model or necessitate specific network training tailored to particular object classes. Some existing methods have achieved promising results in mesh-free object and scene pose estimation by inverting the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). However, they still struggle with adverse initializations such as large rotations and translations. To address this issue, we propose an efficient method for accurate camera pose estimation by inverting 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a gradient-based differentiable framework optimizes camera pose by minimizing the residual between the query image and the rendered image, requiring no training. An end-to-end matching module is designed to enhance the model's robustness against adverse initializations, while minimizing pixel-level comparing loss aids in precise pose estimation. Experimental results on synthetic and complex real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in challenging conditions and the accuracy of camera pose estimation.

This paper describes recent developments in object specific pose and shape prediction from single images. The main contribution is a new approach to camera pose prediction by self-supervised learning of keypoints corresponding to locations on a category specific deformable shape. We designed a network to generate a proxy ground-truth heatmap from a set of keypoints distributed all over the category-specific mean shape, where each is represented by a unique color on a labeled texture. The proxy ground-truth heatmap is used to train a deep keypoint prediction network, which can be used in online inference. The proposed approach to camera pose prediction show significant improvements when compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our approach to camera pose prediction is used to infer 3D objects from 2D image frames of video sequences online. To train the reconstruction model, it receives only a silhouette mask from a single frame of a video sequence in every training step and a category-specific mean object shape. We conducted experiments using three different datasets representing the bird category: the CUB [51] image dataset, YouTubeVos and the Davis video datasets. The network is trained on the CUB dataset and tested on all three datasets. The online experiments are demonstrated on YouTubeVos and Davis [56] video sequences using a network trained on the CUB training set.

We propose real-time, six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 3D face pose estimation without face detection or landmark localization. We observe that estimating the 6DoF rigid transformation of a face is a simpler problem than facial landmark detection, often used for 3D face alignment. In addition, 6DoF offers more information than face bounding box labels. We leverage these observations to make multiple contributions: (a) We describe an easily trained, efficient, Faster R-CNN--based model which regresses 6DoF pose for all faces in the photo, without preliminary face detection. (b) We explain how pose is converted and kept consistent between the input photo and arbitrary crops created while training and evaluating our model. (c) Finally, we show how face poses can replace detection bounding box training labels. Tests on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI show that our method runs at real-time and outperforms state of the art (SotA) face pose estimators. Remarkably, our method also surpasses SotA models of comparable complexity on the WIDER FACE detection benchmark, despite not been optimized on bounding box labels.

6D object pose estimation is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently proven to be capable of predicting reliable 6D pose estimates even from monocular images. Nonetheless, CNNs are identified as being extremely data-driven, and acquiring adequate annotations is oftentimes very time-consuming and labor intensive. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose the idea of monocular 6D pose estimation by means of self-supervised learning, removing the need for real annotations. After training our proposed network fully supervised with synthetic RGB data, we leverage recent advances in neural rendering to further self-supervise the model on unannotated real RGB-D data, seeking for a visually and geometrically optimal alignment. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed self-supervision is able to significantly enhance the model's original performance, outperforming all other methods relying on synthetic data or employing elaborate techniques from the domain adaptation realm.

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.

Object pose estimation, which plays a vital role in robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous driving, has been of great interest in computer vision. Existing studies either require multi-stage pose regression or rely on 2D-3D feature matching. Though these approaches have shown promising results, they rely heavily on appearance information, requiring complex input (i.e., multi-view reference input, depth, or CAD models) and intricate pipeline (i.e., feature extraction-SfM-2D to 3D matching-PnP). We propose AxisPose, a model-free, matching-free, single-shot solution for robust 6D pose estimation, which fundamentally diverges from the existing paradigm. Unlike existing methods that rely on 2D-3D or 2D-2D matching using 3D techniques, such as SfM and PnP, AxisPose directly infers a robust 6D pose from a single view by leveraging a diffusion model to learn the latent axis distribution of objects without reference views. Specifically, AxisPose constructs an Axis Generation Module (AGM) to capture the latent geometric distribution of object axes through a diffusion model. The diffusion process is guided by injecting the gradient of geometric consistency loss into the noise estimation to maintain the geometric consistency of the generated tri-axis. With the generated tri-axis projection, AxisPose further adopts a Triaxial Back-projection Module (TBM) to recover the 6D pose from the object tri-axis. The proposed AxisPose achieves robust performance at the cross-instance level (i.e., one model for N instances) using only a single view as input without reference images, with great potential for generalization to unseen-object level.

Human perception of surroundings is often guided by the various poses present within the environment. Many computer vision tasks, such as human action recognition and robot imitation learning, rely on pose-based entities like human skeletons or robotic arms. However, conventional Vision Transformer (ViT) models uniformly process all patches, neglecting valuable pose priors in input videos. We argue that incorporating poses into RGB data is advantageous for learning fine-grained and viewpoint-agnostic representations. Consequently, we introduce two strategies for learning pose-aware representations in ViTs. The first method, called Pose-aware Attention Block (PAAB), is a plug-and-play ViT block that performs localized attention on pose regions within videos. The second method, dubbed Pose-Aware Auxiliary Task (PAAT), presents an auxiliary pose prediction task optimized jointly with the primary ViT task. Although their functionalities differ, both methods succeed in learning pose-aware representations, enhancing performance in multiple diverse downstream tasks. Our experiments, conducted across seven datasets, reveal the efficacy of both pose-aware methods on three video analysis tasks, with PAAT holding a slight edge over PAAB. Both PAAT and PAAB surpass their respective backbone Transformers by up to 9.8% in real-world action recognition and 21.8% in multi-view robotic video alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/dominickrei/PoseAwareVT.

We present a robust and real-time monocular six degree of freedom relocalization system. Our system trains a convolutional neural network to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single RGB image in an end-to-end manner with no need of additional engineering or graph optimisation. The algorithm can operate indoors and outdoors in real time, taking 5ms per frame to compute. It obtains approximately 2m and 6 degree accuracy for large scale outdoor scenes and 0.5m and 10 degree accuracy indoors. This is achieved using an efficient 23 layer deep convnet, demonstrating that convnets can be used to solve complicated out of image plane regression problems. This was made possible by leveraging transfer learning from large scale classification data. We show the convnet localizes from high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and different camera intrinsics where point based SIFT registration fails. Furthermore we show how the pose feature that is produced generalizes to other scenes allowing us to regress pose with only a few dozen training examples. PoseNet code, dataset and an online demonstration is available on our project webpage, at http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/relocalisation/

Recovering camera poses from a set of images is a foundational task in 3D computer vision, which powers key applications such as 3D scene/object reconstructions. Classic methods often depend on feature correspondence, such as keypoints, which require the input images to have large overlap and small viewpoint changes. Such requirements present considerable challenges in scenarios with sparse views. Recent data-driven approaches aim to directly output camera poses, either through regressing the 6DoF camera poses or formulating rotation as a probability distribution. However, each approach has its limitations. On one hand, directly regressing the camera poses can be ill-posed, since it assumes a single mode, which is not true under symmetry and leads to sub-optimal solutions. On the other hand, probabilistic approaches are capable of modeling the symmetry ambiguity, yet they sample the entire space of rotation uniformly by brute-force. This leads to an inevitable trade-off between high sample density, which improves model precision, and sample efficiency that determines the runtime. In this paper, we propose ADen to unify the two frameworks by employing a generator and a discriminator: the generator is trained to output multiple hypotheses of 6DoF camera pose to represent a distribution and handle multi-mode ambiguity, and the discriminator is trained to identify the hypothesis that best explains the data. This allows ADen to combine the best of both worlds, achieving substantially higher precision as well as lower runtime than previous methods in empirical evaluations.

We present Supermarket-6DoF, a real-world dataset of 1500 grasp attempts across 20 supermarket objects with publicly available 3D models. Unlike most existing grasping datasets that rely on analytical metrics or simulation for grasp labeling, our dataset provides ground-truth outcomes from physical robot executions. Among the few real-world grasping datasets, wile more modest in size, Supermarket-6DoF uniquely features full 6-DoF grasp poses annotated with both initial grasp success and post-grasp stability under external perturbation. We demonstrate the dataset's utility by analyzing three grasp pose representations for grasp success prediction from point clouds. Our results show that representing the gripper geometry explicitly as a point cloud achieves higher prediction accuracy compared to conventional quaternion-based grasp pose encoding.

Tracking the object 6-DoF pose is crucial for various downstream robot tasks and real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate the real-world robot task of aerial vision guidance for aerial robotics manipulation, utilizing category-level 6-DoF pose tracking. Aerial conditions inevitably introduce special challenges, such as rapid viewpoint changes in pitch and roll and inter-frame differences. To support these challenges in task, we firstly introduce a robust category-level 6-DoF pose tracker (Robust6DoF). This tracker leverages shape and temporal prior knowledge to explore optimal inter-frame keypoint pairs, generated under a priori structural adaptive supervision in a coarse-to-fine manner. Notably, our Robust6DoF employs a Spatial-Temporal Augmentation module to deal with the problems of the inter-frame differences and intra-class shape variations through both temporal dynamic filtering and shape-similarity filtering. We further present a Pose-Aware Discrete Servo strategy (PAD-Servo), serving as a decoupling approach to implement the final aerial vision guidance task. It contains two servo action policies to better accommodate the structural properties of aerial robotics manipulation. Exhaustive experiments on four well-known public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our Robust6DoF. Real-world tests directly verify that our Robust6DoF along with PAD-Servo can be readily used in real-world aerial robotic applications.

Model-based human pose estimation is currently approached through two different paradigms. Optimization-based methods fit a parametric body model to 2D observations in an iterative manner, leading to accurate image-model alignments, but are often slow and sensitive to the initialization. In contrast, regression-based methods, that use a deep network to directly estimate the model parameters from pixels, tend to provide reasonable, but not pixel accurate, results while requiring huge amounts of supervision. In this work, instead of investigating which approach is better, our key insight is that the two paradigms can form a strong collaboration. A reasonable, directly regressed estimate from the network can initialize the iterative optimization making the fitting faster and more accurate. Similarly, a pixel accurate fit from iterative optimization can act as strong supervision for the network. This is the core of our proposed approach SPIN (SMPL oPtimization IN the loop). The deep network initializes an iterative optimization routine that fits the body model to 2D joints within the training loop, and the fitted estimate is subsequently used to supervise the network. Our approach is self-improving by nature, since better network estimates can lead the optimization to better solutions, while more accurate optimization fits provide better supervision for the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in different settings, where 3D ground truth is scarce, or not available, and we consistently outperform the state-of-the-art model-based pose estimation approaches by significant margins. The project website with videos, results, and code can be found at https://seas.upenn.edu/~nkolot/projects/spin.

Given sparse views of an object, estimating their camera poses is a long-standing and intractable problem. We harness the pre-trained diffusion model of novel views conditioned on viewpoints (Zero-1-to-3). We present ID-Pose which inverses the denoising diffusion process to estimate the relative pose given two input images. ID-Pose adds a noise on one image, and predicts the noise conditioned on the other image and a decision variable for the pose. The prediction error is used as the objective to find the optimal pose with the gradient descent method. ID-Pose can handle more than two images and estimate each of the poses with multiple image pairs from triangular relationships. ID-Pose requires no training and generalizes to real-world images. We conduct experiments using high-quality real-scanned 3D objects, where ID-Pose significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Learning robust local image feature matching is a fundamental low-level vision task, which has been widely explored in the past few years. Recently, detector-free local feature matchers based on transformers have shown promising results, which largely outperform pure Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based ones. But correlations produced by transformer-based methods are spatially limited to the center of source views' coarse patches, because of the costly attention learning. In this work, we rethink this issue and find that such matching formulation degrades pose estimation, especially for low-resolution images. So we propose a transformer-based cascade matching model -- Cascade feature Matching TRansformer (CasMTR), to efficiently learn dense feature correlations, which allows us to choose more reliable matching pairs for the relative pose estimation. Instead of re-training a new detector, we use a simple yet effective Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-process to filter keypoints through the confidence map, and largely improve the matching precision. CasMTR achieves state-of-the-art performance in indoor and outdoor pose estimation as well as visual localization. Moreover, thorough ablations show the efficacy of the proposed components and techniques.

Inferring the structure of 3D scenes from 2D observations is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recently popularized approaches based on neural scene representations have achieved tremendous impact and have been applied across a variety of applications. One of the major remaining challenges in this space is training a single model which can provide latent representations which effectively generalize beyond a single scene. Scene Representation Transformer (SRT) has shown promise in this direction, but scaling it to a larger set of diverse scenes is challenging and necessitates accurately posed ground truth data. To address this problem, we propose RUST (Really Unposed Scene representation Transformer), a pose-free approach to novel view synthesis trained on RGB images alone. Our main insight is that one can train a Pose Encoder that peeks at the target image and learns a latent pose embedding which is used by the decoder for view synthesis. We perform an empirical investigation into the learned latent pose structure and show that it allows meaningful test-time camera transformations and accurate explicit pose readouts. Perhaps surprisingly, RUST achieves similar quality as methods which have access to perfect camera pose, thereby unlocking the potential for large-scale training of amortized neural scene representations.

We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2022, the fourth in a series of public competitions organized with the goal to capture the status quo in the field of 6D object pose estimation from an RGB/RGB-D image. In 2022, we witnessed another significant improvement in the pose estimation accuracy -- the state of the art, which was 56.9 AR_C in 2019 (Vidal et al.) and 69.8 AR_C in 2020 (CosyPose), moved to new heights of 83.7 AR_C (GDRNPP). Out of 49 pose estimation methods evaluated since 2019, the top 18 are from 2022. Methods based on point pair features, which were introduced in 2010 and achieved competitive results even in 2020, are now clearly outperformed by deep learning methods. The synthetic-to-real domain gap was again significantly reduced, with 82.7 AR_C achieved by GDRNPP trained only on synthetic images from BlenderProc. The fastest variant of GDRNPP reached 80.5 AR_C with an average time per image of 0.23s. Since most of the recent methods for 6D object pose estimation begin by detecting/segmenting objects, we also started evaluating 2D object detection and segmentation performance based on the COCO metrics. Compared to the Mask R-CNN results from CosyPose in 2020, detection improved from 60.3 to 77.3 AP_C and segmentation from 40.5 to 58.7 AP_C. The online evaluation system stays open and is available at: http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/{bop.felk.cvut.cz}.

We introduce Diff-DOPE, a 6-DoF pose refiner that takes as input an image, a 3D textured model of an object, and an initial pose of the object. The method uses differentiable rendering to update the object pose to minimize the visual error between the image and the projection of the model. We show that this simple, yet effective, idea is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on pose estimation datasets. Our approach is a departure from recent methods in which the pose refiner is a deep neural network trained on a large synthetic dataset to map inputs to refinement steps. Rather, our use of differentiable rendering allows us to avoid training altogether. Our approach performs multiple gradient descent optimizations in parallel with different random learning rates to avoid local minima from symmetric objects, similar appearances, or wrong step size. Various modalities can be used, e.g., RGB, depth, intensity edges, and object segmentation masks. We present experiments examining the effect of various choices, showing that the best results are found when the RGB image is accompanied by an object mask and depth image to guide the optimization process.

Edge applications, such as collaborative robotics and spacecraft rendezvous, demand efficient 6D object pose estimation on resource-constrained embedded platforms. Existing 6D pose estimation networks are often too large for such deployments, necessitating compression while maintaining reliable performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Modular Quantization-Aware Training (MQAT), an adaptive and mixed-precision quantization-aware training strategy that exploits the modular structure of modern 6D pose estimation architectures. MQAT guides a systematic gradated modular quantization sequence and determines module-specific bit precisions, leading to quantized models that outperform those produced by state-of-the-art uniform and mixed-precision quantization techniques. Our experiments showcase the generality of MQAT across datasets, architectures, and quantization algorithms. Remarkably, MQAT-trained quantized models achieve a significant accuracy boost (>7%) over the baseline full-precision network while reducing model size by a factor of 4x or more.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has been a subject of intense study in recent years, because of its applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Much of the recent work focuses on improving depth estimation by increasing architecture complexity. This paper shows that state-of-the-art performance can also be achieved by improving the learning process rather than increasing model complexity. More specifically, we propose (i) disregarding small potentially dynamic objects when training, and (ii) employing an appearance-based approach to separately estimate object pose for truly dynamic objects. We demonstrate that these simplifications reduce GPU memory usage by 29% and result in qualitatively and quantitatively improved depth maps. The code is available at https://github.com/kieran514/Dyna-DM.

Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) localizes keypoints across diverse object categories with a single model, using one or a few annotated support images. Recent works have shown that using a pose graph (i.e., treating keypoints as nodes in a graph rather than isolated points) helps handle occlusions and break symmetry. However, these methods assume a static pose graph with equal-weight edges, leading to suboptimal results. We introduce EdgeCape, a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by predicting the graph's edge weights which optimizes localization. To further leverage structural priors, we propose integrating Markovian Structural Bias, which modulates the self-attention interaction between nodes based on the number of hops between them. We show that this improves the model's ability to capture global spatial dependencies. Evaluated on the MP-100 benchmark, which includes 100 categories and over 20K images, EdgeCape achieves state-of-the-art results in the 1-shot setting and leads among similar-sized methods in the 5-shot setting, significantly improving keypoint localization accuracy. Our code is publicly available.

Learning visual features from unlabeled images has proven successful for semantic categorization, often by mapping different views of the same object to the same feature to achieve recognition invariance. However, visual recognition involves not only identifying what an object is but also understanding how it is presented. For example, seeing a car from the side versus head-on is crucial for deciding whether to stay put or jump out of the way. While unsupervised feature learning for downstream viewpoint reasoning is important, it remains under-explored, partly due to the lack of a standardized evaluation method and benchmarks. We introduce a new dataset of adjacent image triplets obtained from a viewpoint trajectory, without any semantic or pose labels. We benchmark both semantic classification and pose estimation accuracies on the same visual feature. Additionally, we propose a viewpoint trajectory regularization loss for learning features from unlabeled image triplets. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach helps develop a visual representation that encodes object identity and organizes objects by their poses, retaining semantic classification accuracy while achieving emergent global pose awareness and better generalization to novel objects. Our dataset and code are available at http://pwang.pw/trajSSL/.

Training accurate 3D human pose estimators requires large amount of 3D ground-truth data which is costly to collect. Various weakly or self supervised pose estimation methods have been proposed due to lack of 3D data. Nevertheless, these methods, in addition to 2D ground-truth poses, require either additional supervision in various forms (e.g. unpaired 3D ground truth data, a small subset of labels) or the camera parameters in multiview settings. To address these problems, we present EpipolarPose, a self-supervised learning method for 3D human pose estimation, which does not need any 3D ground-truth data or camera extrinsics. During training, EpipolarPose estimates 2D poses from multi-view images, and then, utilizes epipolar geometry to obtain a 3D pose and camera geometry which are subsequently used to train a 3D pose estimator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on standard benchmark datasets i.e. Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP where we set the new state-of-the-art among weakly/self-supervised methods. Furthermore, we propose a new performance measure Pose Structure Score (PSS) which is a scale invariant, structure aware measure to evaluate the structural plausibility of a pose with respect to its ground truth. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mkocabas/EpipolarPose

Self-supervised learning of image representations by predicting future frames is a promising direction but still remains a challenge. This is because of the under-determined nature of frame prediction; multiple potential futures can arise from a single current frame. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we revisit the idea of stochastic video generation that learns to capture uncertainty in frame prediction and explore its effectiveness for representation learning. Specifically, we design a framework that trains a stochastic frame prediction model to learn temporal information between frames. Moreover, to learn dense information within each frame, we introduce an auxiliary masked image modeling objective along with a shared decoder architecture. We find this architecture allows for combining both objectives in a synergistic and compute-efficient manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on a variety of tasks from video label propagation and vision-based robot learning domains, such as video segmentation, pose tracking, vision-based robotic locomotion, and manipulation tasks. Code is available on the project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/2024rsp.

Monocular object pose estimation, as a pivotal task in computer vision and robotics, heavily depends on accurate 2D-3D correspondences, which often demand costly CAD models that may not be readily available. Object 3D reconstruction methods offer an alternative, among which recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) afford a compelling potential. Yet its performance still suffers and tends to overfit with fewer input views. Embracing this challenge, we introduce SGPose, a novel framework for sparse view object pose estimation using Gaussian-based methods. Given as few as ten views, SGPose generates a geometric-aware representation by starting with a random cuboid initialization, eschewing reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline-derived geometry as required by traditional 3DGS methods. SGPose removes the dependence on CAD models by regressing dense 2D-3D correspondences between images and the reconstructed model from sparse input and random initialization, while the geometric-consistent depth supervision and online synthetic view warping are key to the success. Experiments on typical benchmarks, especially on the Occlusion LM-O dataset, demonstrate that SGPose outperforms existing methods even under sparse view constraints, under-scoring its potential in real-world applications.

Existing volumetric methods for predicting 3D human pose estimation are accurate, but computationally expensive and optimized for single time-step prediction. We present TEMPO, an efficient multi-view pose estimation model that learns a robust spatiotemporal representation, improving pose accuracy while also tracking and forecasting human pose. We significantly reduce computation compared to the state-of-the-art by recurrently computing per-person 2D pose features, fusing both spatial and temporal information into a single representation. In doing so, our model is able to use spatiotemporal context to predict more accurate human poses without sacrificing efficiency. We further use this representation to track human poses over time as well as predict future poses. Finally, we demonstrate that our model is able to generalize across datasets without scene-specific fine-tuning. TEMPO achieves 10% better MPJPE with a 33times improvement in FPS compared to TesseTrack on the challenging CMU Panoptic Studio dataset.

Efficient and accurate object pose estimation is an essential component for modern vision systems in many applications such as Augmented Reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While research in model-based 6D object pose estimation has delivered promising results, model-free methods are hindered by the high computational load in rendering and inferring consistent poses of arbitrary objects in a live RGB-D video stream. To address this issue, we present 6DOPE-GS, a novel method for online 6D object pose estimation \& tracking with a single RGB-D camera by effectively leveraging advances in Gaussian Splatting. Thanks to the fast differentiable rendering capabilities of Gaussian Splatting, 6DOPE-GS can simultaneously optimize for 6D object poses and 3D object reconstruction. To achieve the necessary efficiency and accuracy for live tracking, our method uses incremental 2D Gaussian Splatting with an intelligent dynamic keyframe selection procedure to achieve high spatial object coverage and prevent erroneous pose updates. We also propose an opacity statistic-based pruning mechanism for adaptive Gaussian density control, to ensure training stability and efficiency. We evaluate our method on the HO3D and YCBInEOAT datasets and show that 6DOPE-GS matches the performance of state-of-the-art baselines for model-free simultaneous 6D pose tracking and reconstruction while providing a 5times speedup. We also demonstrate the method's suitability for live, dynamic object tracking and reconstruction in a real-world setting.

We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2023, the fifth in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in model-based 6D object pose estimation from an RGB/RGB-D image and related tasks. Besides the three tasks from 2022 (model-based 2D detection, 2D segmentation, and 6D localization of objects seen during training), the 2023 challenge introduced new variants of these tasks focused on objects unseen during training. In the new tasks, methods were required to learn new objects during a short onboarding stage (max 5 minutes, 1 GPU) from provided 3D object models. The best 2023 method for 6D localization of unseen objects (GenFlow) notably reached the accuracy of the best 2020 method for seen objects (CosyPose), although being noticeably slower. The best 2023 method for seen objects (GPose) achieved a moderate accuracy improvement but a significant 43% run-time improvement compared to the best 2022 counterpart (GDRNPP). Since 2017, the accuracy of 6D localization of seen objects has improved by more than 50% (from 56.9 to 85.6 AR_C). The online evaluation system stays open and is available at: http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/.

Human pose information is a critical component in many downstream image processing tasks, such as activity recognition and motion tracking. Likewise, a pose estimator for the illustrated character domain would provide a valuable prior for assistive content creation tasks, such as reference pose retrieval and automatic character animation. But while modern data-driven techniques have substantially improved pose estimation performance on natural images, little work has been done for illustrations. In our work, we bridge this domain gap by efficiently transfer-learning from both domain-specific and task-specific source models. Additionally, we upgrade and expand an existing illustrated pose estimation dataset, and introduce two new datasets for classification and segmentation subtasks. We then apply the resultant state-of-the-art character pose estimator to solve the novel task of pose-guided illustration retrieval. All data, models, and code will be made publicly available.

Learning to estimate object pose often requires ground-truth (GT) labels, such as CAD model and absolute-scale object pose, which is expensive and laborious to obtain in the real world. To tackle this problem, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for category-level object pose estimation, called UDA-COPE. Inspired by recent multi-modal UDA techniques, the proposed method exploits a teacher-student self-supervised learning scheme to train a pose estimation network without using target domain pose labels. We also introduce a bidirectional filtering method between the predicted normalized object coordinate space (NOCS) map and observed point cloud, to not only make our teacher network more robust to the target domain but also to provide more reliable pseudo labels for the student network training. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, without leveraging target-domain GT labels, our proposed method achieved comparable or sometimes superior performance to existing methods that depend on the GT labels.

Constructing a 3D scene capable of accommodating open-ended language queries, is a pivotal pursuit, particularly within the domain of robotics. Such technology facilitates robots in executing object manipulations based on human language directives. To tackle this challenge, some research efforts have been dedicated to the development of language-embedded implicit fields. However, implicit fields (e.g. NeRF) encounter limitations due to the necessity of processing a large number of input views for reconstruction, coupled with their inherent inefficiencies in inference. Thus, we present the GaussianGrasper, which utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting to explicitly represent the scene as a collection of Gaussian primitives. Our approach takes a limited set of RGB-D views and employs a tile-based splatting technique to create a feature field. In particular, we propose an Efficient Feature Distillation (EFD) module that employs contrastive learning to efficiently and accurately distill language embeddings derived from foundational models. With the reconstructed geometry of the Gaussian field, our method enables the pre-trained grasping model to generate collision-free grasp pose candidates. Furthermore, we propose a normal-guided grasp module to select the best grasp pose. Through comprehensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate that GaussianGrasper enables robots to accurately query and grasp objects with language instructions, providing a new solution for language-guided manipulation tasks. Data and codes can be available at https://github.com/MrSecant/GaussianGrasper.

6D object pose estimation is a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently proven to be capable of predicting reliable 6D pose estimates even under monocular settings. Nonetheless, CNNs are identified as being extremely data-driven, and acquiring adequate annotations is oftentimes very time-consuming and labor intensive. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel monocular 6D pose estimation approach by means of self-supervised learning, removing the need for real annotations. After training our proposed network fully supervised with synthetic RGB data, we leverage current trends in noisy student training and differentiable rendering to further self-supervise the model on these unsupervised real RGB(-D) samples, seeking for a visually and geometrically optimal alignment. Moreover, employing both visible and amodal mask information, our self-supervision becomes very robust towards challenging scenarios such as occlusion. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed self-supervision outperforms all other methods relying on synthetic data or employing elaborate techniques from the domain adaptation realm. Noteworthy, our self-supervised approach consistently improves over its synthetically trained baseline and often almost closes the gap towards its fully supervised counterpart. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/THU-DA-6D-Pose-Group/self6dpp.git.

In this paper, we present a method for unconstrained end-to-end head pose estimation. We address the problem of ambiguous rotation labels by introducing the rotation matrix formalism for our ground truth data and propose a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation for efficient and robust direct regression. This way, our method can learn the full rotation appearance which is contrary to previous approaches that restrict the pose prediction to a narrow-angle for satisfactory results. In addition, we propose a geodesic distance-based loss to penalize our network with respect to the SO(3) manifold geometry. Experiments on the public AFLW2000 and BIWI datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by up to 20\%. We open-source our training and testing code along with our pre-trained models: https://github.com/thohemp/6DRepNet.

Two-view pose estimation is essential for map-free visual relocalization and object pose tracking tasks. However, traditional matching methods suffer from time-consuming robust estimators, while deep learning-based pose regressors only cater to camera-to-world pose estimation, lacking generalizability to different image sizes and camera intrinsics. In this paper, we propose SRPose, a sparse keypoint-based framework for two-view relative pose estimation in camera-to-world and object-to-camera scenarios. SRPose consists of a sparse keypoint detector, an intrinsic-calibration position encoder, and promptable prior knowledge-guided attention layers. Given two RGB images of a fixed scene or a moving object, SRPose estimates the relative camera or 6D object pose transformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRPose achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed, showing generalizability to both scenarios. It is robust to different image sizes and camera intrinsics, and can be deployed with low computing resources.

We propose a method for in-hand 3D scanning of an unknown object with a monocular camera. Our method relies on a neural implicit surface representation that captures both the geometry and the appearance of the object, however, by contrast with most NeRF-based methods, we do not assume that the camera-object relative poses are known. Instead, we simultaneously optimize both the object shape and the pose trajectory. As direct optimization over all shape and pose parameters is prone to fail without coarse-level initialization, we propose an incremental approach that starts by splitting the sequence into carefully selected overlapping segments within which the optimization is likely to succeed. We reconstruct the object shape and track its poses independently within each segment, then merge all the segments before performing a global optimization. We show that our method is able to reconstruct the shape and color of both textured and challenging texture-less objects, outperforms classical methods that rely only on appearance features, and that its performance is close to recent methods that assume known camera poses.

We present a method to combine markerless motion capture and dense pose feature estimation into a single framework. We demonstrate that dense pose information can help for multiview/single-view motion capture, and multiview motion capture can help the collection of a high-quality dataset for training the dense pose detector. Specifically, we first introduce a novel markerless motion capture method that can take advantage of dense parsing capability provided by the dense pose detector. Thanks to the introduced dense human parsing ability, our method is demonstrated much more efficient, and accurate compared with the available state-of-the-art markerless motion capture approach. Second, we improve the performance of available dense pose detector by using multiview markerless motion capture data. Such dataset is beneficial to dense pose training because they are more dense and accurate and consistent, and can compensate for the corner cases such as unusual viewpoints. We quantitatively demonstrate the improved performance of our dense pose detector over the available DensePose. Our dense pose dataset and detector will be made public.

We propose a method for human pose estimation based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The pose estimation is formulated as a DNN-based regression problem towards body joints. We present a cascade of such DNN regressors which results in high precision pose estimates. The approach has the advantage of reasoning about pose in a holistic fashion and has a simple but yet powerful formulation which capitalizes on recent advances in Deep Learning. We present a detailed empirical analysis with state-of-art or better performance on four academic benchmarks of diverse real-world images.

Perceiving the environment via cameras is crucial for Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotics. While images are a convenient form of representation, they often complicate extracting important geometric details, especially with varying geometries or deformable objects. In contrast, point clouds naturally represent this geometry and easily integrate color and positional data from multiple camera views. However, while deep learning on point clouds has seen many recent successes, RL on point clouds is under-researched, with only the simplest encoder architecture considered in the literature. We introduce PointPatchRL (PPRL), a method for RL on point clouds that builds on the common paradigm of dividing point clouds into overlapping patches, tokenizing them, and processing the tokens with transformers. PPRL provides significant improvements compared with other point-cloud processing architectures previously used for RL. We then complement PPRL with masked reconstruction for representation learning and show that our method outperforms strong model-free and model-based baselines on image observations in complex manipulation tasks containing deformable objects and variations in target object geometry. Videos and code are available at https://alrhub.github.io/pprl-website

In medical and industrial domains, providing guidance for assembly processes can be critical to ensure efficiency and safety. Errors in assembly can lead to significant consequences such as extended surgery times and prolonged manufacturing or maintenance times in industry. Assembly scenarios can benefit from in-situ augmented reality visualization, i.e., augmentations in close proximity to the target object, to provide guidance, reduce assembly times, and minimize errors. In order to enable in-situ visualization, 6D pose estimation can be leveraged to identify the correct location for an augmentation. Existing 6D pose estimation techniques primarily focus on individual objects and static captures. However, assembly scenarios have various dynamics, including occlusion during assembly and dynamics in the appearance of assembly objects. Existing work focus either on object detection combined with state detection, or focus purely on the pose estimation. To address the challenges of 6D pose estimation in combination with assembly state detection, our approach ASDF builds upon the strengths of YOLOv8, a real-time capable object detection framework. We extend this framework, refine the object pose, and fuse pose knowledge with network-detected pose information. Utilizing our late fusion in our Pose2State module results in refined 6D pose estimation and assembly state detection. By combining both pose and state information, our Pose2State module predicts the final assembly state with precision. The evaluation of our ASDF dataset shows that our Pose2State module leads to an improved assembly state detection and that the improvement of the assembly state further leads to a more robust 6D pose estimation. Moreover, on the GBOT dataset, we outperform the pure deep learning-based network and even outperform the hybrid and pure tracking-based approaches.

The recently emerging research area in robotics, ground view change detection, suffers from its ill-posed-ness because of visual uncertainty combined with complex nonlinear perspective projection. To regularize the ill-posed-ness, the commonly applied supervised learning methods (e.g., CSCD-Net) rely on manually annotated high-quality object-class-specific priors. In this work, we consider general application domains where no manual annotation is available and present a fully self-supervised approach. The present approach adopts the powerful and versatile idea that object changes detected during everyday robot navigation can be reused as additional priors to improve future change detection tasks. Furthermore, a robustified framework is implemented and verified experimentally in a new challenging practical application scenario: ground-view small object change detection.

Visual localization aims to determine the camera pose of a query image relative to a database of posed images. In recent years, deep neural networks that directly regress camera poses have gained popularity due to their fast inference capabilities. However, existing methods struggle to either generalize well to new scenes or provide accurate camera pose estimates. To address these issues, we present Reloc3r, a simple yet effective visual localization framework. It consists of an elegantly designed relative pose regression network, and a minimalist motion averaging module for absolute pose estimation. Trained on approximately 8 million posed image pairs, Reloc3r achieves surprisingly good performance and generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 public datasets, consistently demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. It provides high-quality camera pose estimates in real time and generalizes to novel scenes. Code, weights, and data at: https://github.com/ffrivera0/reloc3r.

Estimating 3D human poses only from a 2D human pose sequence is thoroughly explored in recent years. Yet, prior to this, no such work has attempted to unify 2D and 3D pose representations in the shared feature space. In this paper, we propose MPM, a unified 2D-3D human pose representation framework via masked pose modeling. We treat 2D and 3D poses as two different modalities like vision and language and build a single-stream transformer-based architecture. We apply three pretext tasks, which are masked 2D pose modeling, masked 3D pose modeling, and masked 2D pose lifting to pre-train our network and use full-supervision to perform further fine-tuning. A high masking ratio of 72.5% in total with a spatio-temporal mask sampling strategy leading to better relation modeling both in spatial and temporal domains. MPM can handle multiple tasks including 3D human pose estimation, 3D pose estimation from occluded 2D pose, and 3D pose completion in a single framework. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on several widely used human pose datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/vvirgooo2/MPM

Prediction is an appealing objective for self-supervised learning of behavioral skills, particularly for autonomous robots. However, effectively utilizing predictive models for control, especially with raw image inputs, poses a number of major challenges. How should the predictions be used? What happens when they are inaccurate? In this paper, we tackle these questions by proposing a method for learning robotic skills from raw image observations, using only autonomously collected experience. We show that even an imperfect model can complete complex tasks if it can continuously retry, but this requires the model to not lose track of the objective (e.g., the object of interest). To enable a robot to continuously retry a task, we devise a self-supervised algorithm for learning image registration, which can keep track of objects of interest for the duration of the trial. We demonstrate that this idea can be combined with a video-prediction based controller to enable complex behaviors to be learned from scratch using only raw visual inputs, including grasping, repositioning objects, and non-prehensile manipulation. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that a model trained with 160 robot hours of autonomously collected, unlabeled data is able to successfully perform complex manipulation tasks with a wide range of objects not seen during training.

Learning 3D human pose prior is essential to human-centered AI. Here, we present GFPose, a versatile framework to model plausible 3D human poses for various applications. At the core of GFPose is a time-dependent score network, which estimates the gradient on each body joint and progressively denoises the perturbed 3D human pose to match a given task specification. During the denoising process, GFPose implicitly incorporates pose priors in gradients and unifies various discriminative and generative tasks in an elegant framework. Despite the simplicity, GFPose demonstrates great potential in several downstream tasks. Our experiments empirically show that 1) as a multi-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose outperforms existing SOTAs by 20% on Human3.6M dataset. 2) as a single-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose achieves comparable results to deterministic SOTAs, even with a vanilla backbone. 3) GFPose is able to produce diverse and realistic samples in pose denoising, completion and generation tasks. Project page https://sites.google.com/view/gfpose/

Supervised learning of skeleton sequence encoders for action recognition has received significant attention in recent times. However, learning such encoders without labels continues to be a challenging problem. While prior works have shown promising results by applying contrastive learning to pose sequences, the quality of the learned representations is often observed to be closely tied to data augmentations that are used to craft the positives. However, augmenting pose sequences is a difficult task as the geometric constraints among the skeleton joints need to be enforced to make the augmentations realistic for that action. In this work, we propose a new contrastive learning approach to train models for skeleton-based action recognition without labels. Our key contribution is a simple module, HaLP - to Hallucinate Latent Positives for contrastive learning. Specifically, HaLP explores the latent space of poses in suitable directions to generate new positives. To this end, we present a novel optimization formulation to solve for the synthetic positives with an explicit control on their hardness. We propose approximations to the objective, making them solvable in closed form with minimal overhead. We show via experiments that using these generated positives within a standard contrastive learning framework leads to consistent improvements across benchmarks such as NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-II on tasks like linear evaluation, transfer learning, and kNN evaluation. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/anshulbshah/HaLP.

Frequent interactions between individuals are a fundamental challenge for pose estimation algorithms. Current pipelines either use an object detector together with a pose estimator (top-down approach), or localize all body parts first and then link them to predict the pose of individuals (bottom-up). Yet, when individuals closely interact, top-down methods are ill-defined due to overlapping individuals, and bottom-up methods often falsely infer connections to distant body parts. Thus, we propose a novel pipeline called bottom-up conditioned top-down pose estimation (BUCTD) that combines the strengths of bottom-up and top-down methods. Specifically, we propose to use a bottom-up model as the detector, which in addition to an estimated bounding box provides a pose proposal that is fed as condition to an attention-based top-down model. We demonstrate the performance and efficiency of our approach on animal and human pose estimation benchmarks. On CrowdPose and OCHuman, we outperform previous state-of-the-art models by a significant margin. We achieve 78.5 AP on CrowdPose and 47.2 AP on OCHuman, an improvement of 8.6% and 4.9% over the prior art, respectively. Furthermore, we show that our method has excellent performance on non-crowded datasets such as COCO, and strongly improves the performance on multi-animal benchmarks involving mice, fish and monkeys.

Absolute Pose Regression (APR) methods use deep neural networks to directly regress camera poses from RGB images. However, the predominant APR architectures only rely on 2D operations during inference, resulting in limited accuracy of pose estimation due to the lack of 3D geometry constraints or priors. In this work, we propose a test-time refinement pipeline that leverages implicit geometric constraints using a robust feature field to enhance the ability of APR methods to use 3D information during inference. We also introduce a novel Neural Feature Synthesizer (NeFeS) model, which encodes 3D geometric features during training and directly renders dense novel view features at test time to refine APR methods. To enhance the robustness of our model, we introduce a feature fusion module and a progressive training strategy. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art single-image APR accuracy on indoor and outdoor datasets.

6D object pose estimation suffers from reduced accuracy when applied to metallic objects. We set out to improve the state-of-the-art by addressing challenges such as reflections and specular highlights in industrial applications. Our novel BOP-compatible dataset, featuring a diverse set of metallic objects (cans, household, and industrial items) under various lighting and background conditions, provides additional geometric and visual cues. We demonstrate that these cues can be effectively leveraged to enhance overall performance. To illustrate the usefulness of the additional features, we improve upon the GDRNPP algorithm by introducing an additional keypoint prediction and material estimator head in order to improve spatial scene understanding. Evaluations on the new dataset show improved accuracy for metallic objects, supporting the hypothesis that additional geometric and visual cues can improve learning.

Teaching robots new skills quickly and conveniently is crucial for the broader adoption of robotic systems. In this work, we address the problem of one-shot imitation from a single human demonstration, given by an RGB-D video recording through a two-stage process. In the first stage which is offline, we extract the trajectory of the demonstration. This entails segmenting manipulated objects and determining their relative motion in relation to secondary objects such as containers. Subsequently, in the live online trajectory generation stage, we first re-detect all objects, then we warp the demonstration trajectory to the current scene, and finally, we trace the trajectory with the robot. To complete these steps, our method makes leverages several ancillary models, including those for segmentation, relative object pose estimation, and grasp prediction. We systematically evaluate different combinations of correspondence and re-detection methods to validate our design decision across a diverse range of tasks. Specifically, we collect demonstrations of ten different tasks including pick-and-place tasks as well as articulated object manipulation. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations on a real robot system to demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of our approach in real-world scenarios. We make the code publicly available at http://ditto.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

We present a simple baseline for directly estimating the relative pose (rotation and translation, including scale) between two images. Deep methods have recently shown strong progress but often require complex or multi-stage architectures. We show that a handful of modifications can be applied to a Vision Transformer (ViT) to bring its computations close to the Eight-Point Algorithm. This inductive bias enables a simple method to be competitive in multiple settings, often substantially improving over the state of the art with strong performance gains in limited data regimes.

Neural surface reconstruction is sensitive to the camera pose noise, even if state-of-the-art pose estimators like COLMAP or ARKit are used. More importantly, existing Pose-NeRF joint optimisation methods have struggled to improve pose accuracy in challenging real-world scenarios. To overcome the challenges, we introduce the pose residual field (PoRF), a novel implicit representation that uses an MLP for regressing pose updates. This is more robust than the conventional pose parameter optimisation due to parameter sharing that leverages global information over the entire sequence. Furthermore, we propose an epipolar geometry loss to enhance the supervision that leverages the correspondences exported from COLMAP results without the extra computational overhead. Our method yields promising results. On the DTU dataset, we reduce the rotation error by 78\% for COLMAP poses, leading to the decreased reconstruction Chamfer distance from 3.48mm to 0.85mm. On the MobileBrick dataset that contains casually captured unbounded 360-degree videos, our method refines ARKit poses and improves the reconstruction F1 score from 69.18 to 75.67, outperforming that with the dataset provided ground-truth pose (75.14). These achievements demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in refining camera poses and improving the accuracy of neural surface reconstruction in real-world scenarios.

Dense 3D reconstruction from RGB images traditionally assumes static camera pose estimates. This assumption has endured, even as recent works have increasingly focused on real-time methods for mobile devices. However, the assumption of a fixed pose for each image does not hold for online execution: poses from real-time SLAM are dynamic and may be updated following events such as bundle adjustment and loop closure. This has been addressed in the RGB-D setting, by de-integrating past views and re-integrating them with updated poses, but it remains largely untreated in the RGB-only setting. We formalize this problem to define the new task of dense online reconstruction from dynamically-posed images. To support further research, we introduce a dataset called LivePose containing the dynamic poses from a SLAM system running on ScanNet. We select three recent reconstruction systems and apply a framework based on de-integration to adapt each one to the dynamic-pose setting. In addition, we propose a novel, non-linear de-integration module that learns to remove stale scene content. We show that responding to pose updates is critical for high-quality reconstruction, and that our de-integration framework is an effective solution.

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

We present FLARE, a feed-forward model designed to infer high-quality camera poses and 3D geometry from uncalibrated sparse-view images (i.e., as few as 2-8 inputs), which is a challenging yet practical setting in real-world applications. Our solution features a cascaded learning paradigm with camera pose serving as the critical bridge, recognizing its essential role in mapping 3D structures onto 2D image planes. Concretely, FLARE starts with camera pose estimation, whose results condition the subsequent learning of geometric structure and appearance, optimized through the objectives of geometry reconstruction and novel-view synthesis. Utilizing large-scale public datasets for training, our method delivers state-of-the-art performance in the tasks of pose estimation, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis, while maintaining the inference efficiency (i.e., less than 0.5 seconds). The project page and code can be found at: https://zhanghe3z.github.io/FLARE/

Next Best View computation (NBV) is a long-standing problem in robotics, and consists in identifying the next most informative sensor position(s) for reconstructing a 3D object or scene efficiently and accurately. Like most current methods, we consider NBV prediction from a depth sensor like Lidar systems. Learning-based methods relying on a volumetric representation of the scene are suitable for path planning, but have lower accuracy than methods using a surface-based representation. However, the latter do not scale well with the size of the scene and constrain the camera to a small number of poses. To obtain the advantages of both representations, we show that we can maximize surface metrics by Monte Carlo integration over a volumetric representation. In particular, we propose an approach, SCONE, that relies on two neural modules: The first module predicts occupancy probability in the entire volume of the scene. Given any new camera pose, the second module samples points in the scene based on their occupancy probability and leverages a self-attention mechanism to predict the visibility of the samples. Finally, we integrate the visibility to evaluate the gain in surface coverage for the new camera pose. NBV is selected as the pose that maximizes the gain in total surface coverage. Our method scales to large scenes and handles free camera motion: It takes as input an arbitrarily large point cloud gathered by a depth sensor as well as camera poses to predict NBV. We demonstrate our approach on a novel dataset made of large and complex 3D scenes.

Estimating camera poses is a fundamental task for 3D reconstruction and remains challenging given sparsely sampled views (<10). In contrast to existing approaches that pursue top-down prediction of global parametrizations of camera extrinsics, we propose a distributed representation of camera pose that treats a camera as a bundle of rays. This representation allows for a tight coupling with spatial image features improving pose precision. We observe that this representation is naturally suited for set-level transformers and develop a regression-based approach that maps image patches to corresponding rays. To capture the inherent uncertainties in sparse-view pose inference, we adapt this approach to learn a denoising diffusion model which allows us to sample plausible modes while improving performance. Our proposed methods, both regression- and diffusion-based, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on camera pose estimation on CO3D while generalizing to unseen object categories and in-the-wild captures.

Well structured visual representations can make robot learning faster and can improve generalization. In this paper, we study how we can acquire effective object-centric representations for robotic manipulation tasks without human labeling by using autonomous robot interaction with the environment. Such representation learning methods can benefit from continuous refinement of the representation as the robot collects more experience, allowing them to scale effectively without human intervention. Our representation learning approach is based on object persistence: when a robot removes an object from a scene, the representation of that scene should change according to the features of the object that was removed. We formulate an arithmetic relationship between feature vectors from this observation, and use it to learn a representation of scenes and objects that can then be used to identify object instances, localize them in the scene, and perform goal-directed grasping tasks where the robot must retrieve commanded objects from a bin. The same grasping procedure can also be used to automatically collect training data for our method, by recording images of scenes, grasping and removing an object, and recording the outcome. Our experiments demonstrate that this self-supervised approach for tasked grasping substantially outperforms direct reinforcement learning from images and prior representation learning methods.

We present a self-supervised sensorimotor pre-training approach for robotics. Our model, called RPT, is a Transformer that operates on sequences of sensorimotor tokens. Given a sequence of camera images, proprioceptive robot states, and past actions, we encode the interleaved sequence into tokens, mask out a random subset, and train a model to predict the masked-out content. We hypothesize that if the robot can predict the missing content it has acquired a good model of the physical world that can enable it to act. RPT is designed to operate on latent visual representations which makes prediction tractable, enables scaling to 10x larger models, and 10 Hz inference on a real robot. To evaluate our approach, we collect a dataset of 20,000 real-world trajectories over 9 months using a combination of motion planning and model-based grasping algorithms. We find that pre-training on this data consistently outperforms training from scratch, leads to 2x improvements in the block stacking task, and has favorable scaling properties.

Vision-based localization in a prior map is of crucial importance for autonomous vehicles. Given a query image, the goal is to estimate the camera pose corresponding to the prior map, and the key is the registration problem of camera images within the map. While autonomous vehicles drive on the road under occlusion (e.g., car, bus, truck) and changing environment appearance (e.g., illumination changes, seasonal variation), existing approaches rely heavily on dense point descriptors at the feature level to solve the registration problem, entangling features with appearance and occlusion. As a result, they often fail to estimate the correct poses. To address these issues, we propose a sparse semantic map-based monocular localization method, which solves 2D-3D registration via a well-designed deep neural network. Given a sparse semantic map that consists of simplified elements (e.g., pole lines, traffic sign midpoints) with multiple semantic labels, the camera pose is then estimated by learning the corresponding features between the 2D semantic elements from the image and the 3D elements from the sparse semantic map. The proposed sparse semantic map-based localization approach is robust against occlusion and long-term appearance changes in the environments. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

We present Loc-NeRF, a real-time vision-based robot localization approach that combines Monte Carlo localization and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Our system uses a pre-trained NeRF model as the map of an environment and can localize itself in real-time using an RGB camera as the only exteroceptive sensor onboard the robot. While neural radiance fields have seen significant applications for visual rendering in computer vision and graphics, they have found limited use in robotics. Existing approaches for NeRF-based localization require both a good initial pose guess and significant computation, making them impractical for real-time robotics applications. By using Monte Carlo localization as a workhorse to estimate poses using a NeRF map model, Loc-NeRF is able to perform localization faster than the state of the art and without relying on an initial pose estimate. In addition to testing on synthetic data, we also run our system using real data collected by a Clearpath Jackal UGV and demonstrate for the first time the ability to perform real-time global localization with neural radiance fields. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/Loc-NeRF.

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/

Markerless Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) aims to anchor digital content in the physical world without using specific 2D or 3D objects. Absolute Pose Regressors (APR) are end-to-end machine learning solutions that infer the device's pose from a single monocular image. Thanks to their low computation cost, they can be directly executed on the constrained hardware of mobile AR devices. However, APR methods tend to yield significant inaccuracies for input images that are too distant from the training set. This paper introduces KS-APR, a pipeline that assesses the reliability of an estimated pose with minimal overhead by combining the inference results of the APR and the prior images in the training set. Mobile AR systems tend to rely upon visual-inertial odometry to track the relative pose of the device during the experience. As such, KS-APR favours reliability over frequency, discarding unreliable poses. This pipeline can integrate most existing APR methods to improve accuracy by filtering unreliable images with their pose estimates. We implement the pipeline on three types of APR models on indoor and outdoor datasets. The median error on position and orientation is reduced for all models, and the proportion of large errors is minimized across datasets. Our method enables state-of-the-art APRs such as DFNetdm to outperform single-image and sequential APR methods. These results demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of KS-APR for visual localization tasks that do not require one-shot decisions.

The pre-training of visual representations has enhanced the efficiency of robot learning. Due to the lack of large-scale in-domain robotic datasets, prior works utilize in-the-wild human videos to pre-train robotic visual representation. Despite their promising results, representations from human videos are inevitably subject to distribution shifts and lack the dynamics information crucial for task completion. We first evaluate various pre-trained representations in terms of their correlation to the downstream robotic manipulation tasks (i.e., manipulation centricity). Interestingly, we find that the "manipulation centricity" is a strong indicator of success rates when applied to downstream tasks. Drawing from these findings, we propose Manipulation Centric Representation (MCR), a foundation representation learning framework capturing both visual features and the dynamics information such as actions and proprioceptions of manipulation tasks to improve manipulation centricity. Specifically, we pre-train a visual encoder on the DROID robotic dataset and leverage motion-relevant data such as robot proprioceptive states and actions. We introduce a novel contrastive loss that aligns visual observations with the robot's proprioceptive state-action dynamics, combined with a behavior cloning (BC)-like actor loss to predict actions during pre-training, along with a time contrastive loss. Empirical results across 4 simulation domains with 20 tasks verify that MCR outperforms the strongest baseline method by 14.8%. Moreover, MCR boosts the performance of data-efficient learning with a UR5e arm on 3 real-world tasks by 76.9%. Project website: https://robots-pretrain-robots.github.io/.

Recent advancements in visual localization and mapping have demonstrated considerable success in integrating point and line features. However, expanding the localization framework to include additional mapping components frequently results in increased demand for memory and computational resources dedicated to matching tasks. In this study, we show how a lightweight neural network can learn to represent both 3D point and line features, and exhibit leading pose accuracy by harnessing the power of multiple learned mappings. Specifically, we utilize a single transformer block to encode line features, effectively transforming them into distinctive point-like descriptors. Subsequently, we treat these point and line descriptor sets as distinct yet interconnected feature sets. Through the integration of self- and cross-attention within several graph layers, our method effectively refines each feature before regressing 3D maps using two simple MLPs. In comprehensive experiments, our indoor localization findings surpass those of Hloc and Limap across both point-based and line-assisted configurations. Moreover, in outdoor scenarios, our method secures a significant lead, marking the most considerable enhancement over state-of-the-art learning-based methodologies. The source code and demo videos of this work are publicly available at: https://thpjp.github.io/pl2map/

We present a near real-time method for 6-DoF tracking of an unknown object from a monocular RGBD video sequence, while simultaneously performing neural 3D reconstruction of the object. Our method works for arbitrary rigid objects, even when visual texture is largely absent. The object is assumed to be segmented in the first frame only. No additional information is required, and no assumption is made about the interaction agent. Key to our method is a Neural Object Field that is learned concurrently with a pose graph optimization process in order to robustly accumulate information into a consistent 3D representation capturing both geometry and appearance. A dynamic pool of posed memory frames is automatically maintained to facilitate communication between these threads. Our approach handles challenging sequences with large pose changes, partial and full occlusion, untextured surfaces, and specular highlights. We show results on HO3D, YCBInEOAT, and BEHAVE datasets, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. Project page: https://bundlesdf.github.io

In this paper, we introduce a method for reconstructing 3D humans from a single image using a biomechanically accurate skeleton model. To achieve this, we train a transformer that takes an image as input and estimates the parameters of the model. Due to the lack of training data for this task, we build a pipeline to produce pseudo ground truth model parameters for single images and implement a training procedure that iteratively refines these pseudo labels. Compared to state-of-the-art methods for 3D human mesh recovery, our model achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks, while it significantly outperforms them in settings with extreme 3D poses and viewpoints. Additionally, we show that previous reconstruction methods frequently violate joint angle limits, leading to unnatural rotations. In contrast, our approach leverages the biomechanically plausible degrees of freedom making more realistic joint rotation estimates. We validate our approach across multiple human pose estimation benchmarks. We make the code, models and data available at: https://isshikihugh.github.io/HSMR/

Many mobile robots rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping, and navigation. However, those sensors are unable to correctly provide distance to obstacles such as glass panels and tables whose actual occupancy is invisible at the height the sensor is measuring. In this work, instead of estimating the distance to obstacles from richer sensor readings such as 3D lasers or RGBD sensors, we present a method to estimate the distance directly from raw 2D laser data. To learn a mapping from raw 2D laser distances to obstacle distances we frame the problem as a learning task and train a neural network formed as an autoencoder. A novel configuration of network hyperparameters is proposed for the task at hand and is quantitatively validated on a test set. Finally, we qualitatively demonstrate in real time on a Care-O-bot 4 that the trained network can successfully infer obstacle distances from partial 2D laser readings.

This work focuses on the 3D reconstruction of non-rigid objects based on monocular RGB video sequences. Concretely, we aim at building high-fidelity models for generic object categories and casually captured scenes. To this end, we do not assume known root poses of objects, and do not utilize category-specific templates or dense pose priors. The key idea of our method, Root Pose Decomposition (RPD), is to maintain a per-frame root pose transformation, meanwhile building a dense field with local transformations to rectify the root pose. The optimization of local transformations is performed by point registration to the canonical space. We also adapt RPD to multi-object scenarios with object occlusions and individual differences. As a result, RPD allows non-rigid 3D reconstruction for complicated scenarios containing objects with large deformations, complex motion patterns, occlusions, and scale diversities of different individuals. Such a pipeline potentially scales to diverse sets of objects in the wild. We experimentally show that RPD surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the challenging DAVIS, OVIS, and AMA datasets.

We address the problem of fitting a parametric human body model (SMPL) to point cloud data. Optimization-based methods require careful initialization and are prone to becoming trapped in local optima. Learning-based methods address this but do not generalize well when the input pose is far from those seen during training. For rigid point clouds, remarkable generalization has been achieved by leveraging SE(3)-equivariant networks, but these methods do not work on articulated objects. In this work we extend this idea to human bodies and propose ArtEq, a novel part-based SE(3)-equivariant neural architecture for SMPL model estimation from point clouds. Specifically, we learn a part detection network by leveraging local SO(3) invariance, and regress shape and pose using articulated SE(3) shape-invariant and pose-equivariant networks, all trained end-to-end. Our novel pose regression module leverages the permutation-equivariant property of self-attention layers to preserve rotational equivariance. Experimental results show that ArtEq generalizes to poses not seen during training, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by ~44% in terms of body reconstruction accuracy, without requiring an optimization refinement step. Furthermore, ArtEq is three orders of magnitude faster during inference than prior work and has 97.3% fewer parameters. The code and model are available for research purposes at https://arteq.is.tue.mpg.de.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has garnered considerable attention for its applications in autonomous driving and robotics. While recent methods have made strides in leveraging techniques like the Self Query Layer (SQL) to infer depth from motion, they often overlook the potential of strengthening pose information. In this paper, we introduce SPIdepth, a novel approach that prioritizes enhancing the pose network for improved depth estimation. Building upon the foundation laid by SQL, SPIdepth emphasizes the importance of pose information in capturing fine-grained scene structures. By enhancing the pose network's capabilities, SPIdepth achieves remarkable advancements in scene understanding and depth estimation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets such as KITTI, Cityscapes, and Make3D showcase SPIdepth's state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous methods by significant margins. Specifically, SPIdepth tops the self-supervised KITTI benchmark. Additionally, SPIdepth achieves the lowest AbsRel (0.029), SqRel (0.069), and RMSE (1.394) on KITTI, establishing new state-of-the-art results. On Cityscapes, SPIdepth shows improvements over SQLdepth of 21.7% in AbsRel, 36.8% in SqRel, and 16.5% in RMSE, even without using motion masks. On Make3D, SPIdepth in zero-shot outperforms all other models. Remarkably, SPIdepth achieves these results using only a single image for inference, surpassing even methods that utilize video sequences for inference, thus demonstrating its efficacy and efficiency in real-world applications. Our approach represents a significant leap forward in self-supervised monocular depth estimation, underscoring the importance of strengthening pose information for advancing scene understanding in real-world applications. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Lavreniuk/SPIdepth.

6D Object Pose Estimation is a crucial yet challenging task in computer vision, suffering from a significant lack of large-scale datasets. This scarcity impedes comprehensive evaluation of model performance, limiting research advancements. Furthermore, the restricted number of available instances or categories curtails its applications. To address these issues, this paper introduces Omni6DPose, a substantial dataset characterized by its diversity in object categories, large scale, and variety in object materials. Omni6DPose is divided into three main components: ROPE (Real 6D Object Pose Estimation Dataset), which includes 332K images annotated with over 1.5M annotations across 581 instances in 149 categories; SOPE(Simulated 6D Object Pose Estimation Dataset), consisting of 475K images created in a mixed reality setting with depth simulation, annotated with over 5M annotations across 4162 instances in the same 149 categories; and the manually aligned real scanned objects used in both ROPE and SOPE. Omni6DPose is inherently challenging due to the substantial variations and ambiguities. To address this challenge, we introduce GenPose++, an enhanced version of the SOTA category-level pose estimation framework, incorporating two pivotal improvements: Semantic-aware feature extraction and Clustering-based aggregation. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive benchmarking analysis to evaluate the performance of previous methods on this large-scale dataset in the realms of 6D object pose estimation and pose tracking.

Animal pose estimation is challenging for existing image-based methods because of limited training data and large intra- and inter-species variances. Motivated by the progress of visual-language research, we propose that pre-trained language models (e.g., CLIP) can facilitate animal pose estimation by providing rich prior knowledge for describing animal keypoints in text. However, we found that building effective connections between pre-trained language models and visual animal keypoints is non-trivial since the gap between text-based descriptions and keypoint-based visual features about animal pose can be significant. To address this issue, we introduce a novel prompt-based Contrastive learning scheme for connecting Language and AniMal Pose (CLAMP) effectively. The CLAMP attempts to bridge the gap by adapting the text prompts to the animal keypoints during network training. The adaptation is decomposed into spatial-aware and feature-aware processes, and two novel contrastive losses are devised correspondingly. In practice, the CLAMP enables the first cross-modal animal pose estimation paradigm. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under the supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings, outperforming image-based methods by a large margin.

Robot manipulation relies on accurately predicting contact points and end-effector directions to ensure successful operation. However, learning-based robot manipulation, trained on a limited category within a simulator, often struggles to achieve generalizability, especially when confronted with extensive categories. Therefore, we introduce an innovative approach for robot manipulation that leverages the robust reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance the stability and generalization of manipulation. By fine-tuning the injected adapters, we preserve the inherent common sense and reasoning ability of the MLLMs while equipping them with the ability for manipulation. The fundamental insight lies in the introduced fine-tuning paradigm, encompassing object category understanding, affordance prior reasoning, and object-centric pose prediction to stimulate the reasoning ability of MLLM in manipulation. During inference, our approach utilizes an RGB image and text prompt to predict the end effector's pose in chain of thoughts. After the initial contact is established, an active impedance adaptation policy is introduced to plan the upcoming waypoints in a closed-loop manner. Moreover, in real world, we design a test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for manipulation to enable the model better adapt to the current real-world scene configuration. Experiments in simulator and real-world show the promising performance of ManipLLM. More details and demonstrations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/manipllm.

3D scene understanding for robotic applications exhibits a unique set of requirements including real-time inference, object-centric latent representation learning, accurate 6D pose estimation and 3D reconstruction of objects. Current methods for scene understanding typically rely on a combination of trained models paired with either an explicit or learnt volumetric representation, all of which have their own drawbacks and limitations. We introduce DreamUp3D, a novel Object-Centric Generative Model (OCGM) designed explicitly to perform inference on a 3D scene informed only by a single RGB-D image. DreamUp3D is a self-supervised model, trained end-to-end, and is capable of segmenting objects, providing 3D object reconstructions, generating object-centric latent representations and accurate per-object 6D pose estimates. We compare DreamUp3D to baselines including NeRFs, pre-trained CLIP-features, ObSurf, and ObPose, in a range of tasks including 3D scene reconstruction, object matching and object pose estimation. Our experiments show that our model outperforms all baselines by a significant margin in real-world scenarios displaying its applicability for 3D scene understanding tasks while meeting the strict demands exhibited in robotics applications.

For robots to robustly understand and interact with the physical world, it is highly beneficial to have a comprehensive representation - modelling geometry, physics, and visual observations - that informs perception, planning, and control algorithms. We propose a novel dual Gaussian-Particle representation that models the physical world while (i) enabling predictive simulation of future states and (ii) allowing online correction from visual observations in a dynamic world. Our representation comprises particles that capture the geometrical aspect of objects in the world and can be used alongside a particle-based physics system to anticipate physically plausible future states. Attached to these particles are 3D Gaussians that render images from any viewpoint through a splatting process thus capturing the visual state. By comparing the predicted and observed images, our approach generates visual forces that correct the particle positions while respecting known physical constraints. By integrating predictive physical modelling with continuous visually-derived corrections, our unified representation reasons about the present and future while synchronizing with reality. Our system runs in realtime at 30Hz using only 3 cameras. We validate our approach on 2D and 3D tracking tasks as well as photometric reconstruction quality. Videos are found at https://embodied-gaussians.github.io/.

Foundation models pre-trained on massive unlabeled datasets have revolutionized natural language and computer vision, exhibiting remarkable generalization capabilities, thus highlighting the importance of pre-training. Yet, efforts in robotics have struggled to achieve similar success, limited by either the need for costly robotic annotations or the lack of representations that effectively model the physical world. In this paper, we introduce ARM4R, an Auto-regressive Robotic Model that leverages low-level 4D Representations learned from human video data to yield a better pre-trained robotic model. Specifically, we focus on utilizing 3D point tracking representations from videos derived by lifting 2D representations into 3D space via monocular depth estimation across time. These 4D representations maintain a shared geometric structure between the points and robot state representations up to a linear transformation, enabling efficient transfer learning from human video data to low-level robotic control. Our experiments show that ARM4R can transfer efficiently from human video data to robotics and consistently improves performance on tasks across various robot environments and configurations.

The intrinsic rotation invariance lies at the core of matching point clouds with handcrafted descriptors. However, it is widely despised by recent deep matchers that obtain the rotation invariance extrinsically via data augmentation. As the finite number of augmented rotations can never span the continuous SO(3) space, these methods usually show instability when facing rotations that are rarely seen. To this end, we introduce RoITr, a Rotation-Invariant Transformer to cope with the pose variations in the point cloud matching task. We contribute both on the local and global levels. Starting from the local level, we introduce an attention mechanism embedded with Point Pair Feature (PPF)-based coordinates to describe the pose-invariant geometry, upon which a novel attention-based encoder-decoder architecture is constructed. We further propose a global transformer with rotation-invariant cross-frame spatial awareness learned by the self-attention mechanism, which significantly improves the feature distinctiveness and makes the model robust with respect to the low overlap. Experiments are conducted on both the rigid and non-rigid public benchmarks, where RoITr outperforms all the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin in the low-overlapping scenarios. Especially when the rotations are enlarged on the challenging 3DLoMatch benchmark, RoITr surpasses the existing methods by at least 13 and 5 percentage points in terms of Inlier Ratio and Registration Recall, respectively.

In this paper, we introduce GS-SLAM that first utilizes 3D Gaussian representation in the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system. It facilitates a better balance between efficiency and accuracy. Compared to recent SLAM methods employing neural implicit representations, our method utilizes a real-time differentiable splatting rendering pipeline that offers significant speedup to map optimization and RGB-D re-rendering. Specifically, we propose an adaptive expansion strategy that adds new or deletes noisy 3D Gaussian in order to efficiently reconstruct new observed scene geometry and improve the mapping of previously observed areas. This strategy is essential to extend 3D Gaussian representation to reconstruct the whole scene rather than synthesize a static object in existing methods. Moreover, in the pose tracking process, an effective coarse-to-fine technique is designed to select reliable 3D Gaussian representations to optimize camera pose, resulting in runtime reduction and robust estimation. Our method achieves competitive performance compared with existing state-of-the-art real-time methods on the Replica, TUM-RGBD datasets. The source code will be released soon.

The absolute depth values of surrounding environments provide crucial cues for various assistive technologies, such as localization, navigation, and 3D structure estimation. We propose that accurate depth estimated from panoramic images can serve as a powerful and light-weight input for a wide range of downstream tasks requiring 3D information. While panoramic images can easily capture the surrounding context from commodity devices, the estimated depth shares the limitations of conventional image-based depth estimation; the performance deteriorates under large domain shifts and the absolute values are still ambiguous to infer from 2D observations. By taking advantage of the holistic view, we mitigate such effects in a self-supervised way and fine-tune the network with geometric consistency during the test phase. Specifically, we construct a 3D point cloud from the current depth prediction and project the point cloud at various viewpoints or apply stretches on the current input image to generate synthetic panoramas. Then we minimize the discrepancy of the 3D structure estimated from synthetic images without collecting additional data. We empirically evaluate our method in robot navigation and map-free localization where our method shows large performance enhancements. Our calibration method can therefore widen the applicability under various external conditions, serving as a key component for practical panorama-based machine vision systems.