Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This comprehensive survey reviews recent deep learning methods for object pose estimation, covering various problem formulations, data modalities, and benchmarks, highlighting challenges and future research directions in the field.

Contribution

It provides an extensive overview of recent advances, datasets, evaluation metrics, and performance benchmarks in deep learning-based object pose estimation, filling a gap in current literature.

Findings

Deep learning models outperform traditional methods in accuracy and robustness.

Current challenges include data dependency, generalization, and robustness under challenging conditions.

The survey identifies promising future research directions in the field.

Abstract

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, \emph{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.