Global Hypothesis Generation for 6D Object Pose Estimation

Frank Michel, Alexander Kirillov, Eric Brachmann, Alexander Krull, Stefan Gumhold, Bogdan Savchynskyy, Carsten Rother; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 462-471

This paper addresses the task of estimating the 6D-pose of a known 3D object from a single RGB-D image. Most modern approaches solve this task in three steps: i) compute local features; ii) generate a pool of pose-hypotheses; iii) select and refine a pose from the pool. This work focuses on the second step. While all existing approaches generate the hypotheses pool via local reasoning, e.g. RANSAC or Hough-Voting, we are the first to show that global reasoning is beneficial at this stage. In particular, we formulate a novel fully-connected Conditional Random Field (CRF) that outputs a very small number of pose-hypotheses. Despite the potential functions of the CRF being non-Gaussian, we give a new, efficient two-step optimization procedure, with some guarantees for optimality. We utilize our global hypotheses generation procedure to produce results that exceed state-of-the-art for the challenging "Occluded Object Dataset".