Learning a Category-Level 3D Object Pose Estimator without Requiring Pose Annotations

Core Concepts

We propose a method to learn a category-level 3D object pose estimator without requiring any pose annotations. By leveraging diffusion models to generate multiple views of objects and an image encoder to extract robust features, our model can learn the 3D pose correspondence from the generated views and outperform state-of-the-art methods on few-shot category-level pose estimation benchmarks.

Abstract

The paper proposes a method to learn a category-level 3D object pose estimator without requiring any pose annotations. The key ideas are:

1. Leveraging diffusion models (e.g., Zero-1-to-3) to generate multiple views of objects with controlled poses from a single unannotated image.
2. Introducing an image encoder to filter out unreasonable details and extract robust image features from the generated views.
3. Jointly optimizing neural meshes for each object instance to learn the 3D pose correspondence from the generated views, and merging the learned meshes into a category-level representation.

The experiments show that the proposed method can perform category-level 3D object pose estimation using a single shot annotation as the pose definition, and significantly outperform state-of-the-art few-shot category-level pose estimation methods on the PASCAL3D+ and KITTI datasets, even without using any pose annotations during training.

Stats

The paper does not provide any specific numerical data or metrics in the main text. The key results are presented in the form of qualitative visualizations and comparisons to state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Quotes

The paper does not contain any direct quotes that are particularly striking or support the key logics.

Key Insights Distilled From

Learning a Category-level Object Pose Estimator without Pose Annotations

by Fengrui Tian... at arxiv.org 04-09-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05626.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the proposed method be extended to handle occlusions and cluttered scenes, which are common in real-world applications

The proposed method can be extended to handle occlusions and cluttered scenes by incorporating additional information and techniques into the training process. One approach could be to introduce occlusion-aware training data, where the generated views include occluded instances of objects. By training the model on such data, it can learn to estimate poses even when parts of the object are occluded. Additionally, techniques like data augmentation with occlusion patterns and incorporating occlusion reasoning modules into the neural network architecture can help the model better handle occlusions. Furthermore, integrating context-aware features and attention mechanisms can assist in distinguishing objects from cluttered backgrounds, improving the model's robustness in cluttered scenes.

What are the potential limitations of using diffusion models for generating diverse object views, and how can these limitations be addressed

One potential limitation of using diffusion models for generating diverse object views is the challenge of capturing fine details and textures accurately. Diffusion models may struggle with preserving high-frequency details, leading to blurry or distorted images. To address this limitation, techniques like progressive refinement during image generation, incorporating adversarial training for sharper image outputs, and leveraging high-resolution generative models can help improve the quality of generated views. Additionally, post-processing techniques such as super-resolution can be applied to enhance the visual fidelity of the generated images. Fine-tuning the diffusion model architecture and training process specifically for object view generation can also help mitigate these limitations.

How can the learned category-level pose estimator be integrated with other computer vision tasks, such as object detection and segmentation, to enable more holistic scene understanding

The learned category-level pose estimator can be integrated with other computer vision tasks to enable more holistic scene understanding. For object detection, the pose information can be utilized to improve localization accuracy and handle instances with varying orientations. By incorporating the pose estimator into the object detection pipeline, the model can predict not only the bounding box but also the precise 3D pose of detected objects. In segmentation tasks, the pose estimator can assist in instance segmentation by providing additional cues for distinguishing between overlapping objects. By combining the pose information with segmentation masks, the model can achieve more accurate and detailed object segmentation results. Integrating the category-level pose estimator with these tasks can lead to more comprehensive and context-aware scene understanding in computer vision applications.