End-to-End Implicit Object Pose Estimation

Abstract

To accurately estimate the 6D pose of objects, most methods employ a two-stage algorithm. While such two-stage algorithms achieve high accuracy, they are often slow. Additionally, many approaches utilize encoding–decoding to obtain the 6D pose, with many employing bilinear sampling for decoding. However, bilinear sampling tends to sacrifice the accuracy of precise features. In our research, we propose a novel solution that utilizes implicit representation as a bridge between discrete feature maps and continuous feature maps. We represent the feature map as a coordinate field, where each coordinate pair corresponds to a feature value. These feature values are then used to estimate feature maps of arbitrary scales, replacing upsampling for decoding. We apply the proposed implicit module to a bidirectional fusion feature pyramid network. Based on this implicit module, we propose three network branches: a class estimation branch, a bounding box estimation branch, and the final pose estimation branch. For this pose estimation branch, we propose a miniature dual-stream network, which estimates object surface features and complements the relationship between 2D and 3D. We represent the rotation component using the SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) representation method, resulting in a more accurate object pose. We achieved satisfactory experimental results on the widely used 6D pose estimation benchmark dataset Linemod. This innovative approach provides a more convenient solution for 6D object pose estimation.