Particle-based 6D Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds using Diffusion Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diffusion-based generative model for 6D object pose estimation from point clouds, effectively handling pose ambiguity and occlusions by sampling multiple hypotheses and selecting the best pose without additional training.

Contribution

It proposes a novel diffusion model operating on point clouds for pose estimation, with new pose selection strategies and SE(3)-equivariant latent space for improved inference.

Findings

Competitive performance on Linemod dataset

Effective pose hypothesis sampling and selection

Operates solely on point cloud data

Abstract

Object pose estimation from a single view remains a challenging problem. In particular, partial observability, occlusions, and object symmetries eventually result in pose ambiguity. To account for this multimodality, this work proposes training a diffusion-based generative model for 6D object pose estimation. During inference, the trained generative model allows for sampling multiple particles, i.e., pose hypotheses. To distill this information into a single pose estimate, we propose two novel and effective pose selection strategies that do not require any additional training or computationally intensive operations. Moreover, while many existing methods for pose estimation primarily focus on the image domain and only incorporate depth information for final pose refinement, our model solely operates on point cloud data. The model thereby leverages recent advancements in point cloud processing and operates upon an SE(3)-equivariant latent space that forms the basis for the particle selection strategies and allows for improved inference times. Our thorough experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach on the Linemod dataset and showcase the effectiveness of our design choices. Code is available at https://github.com/zitronian/6DPoseDiffusion .