Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

Estimating the 6D pose of unseen objects is a fundamental yet challenging problem for open-world robotics and embodied perception. Model-based methods are accurate but depend on CAD assets or heavy onboarding, while most model-free approaches are still limited to pairwise single-anchor matching and thus fail under occlusion and large viewpoint changes with low query-reference overlap. Therefore, we present PANY, a unified model-free framework that seamlessly supports both RGB and RGB-D inputs, operates on one or sparse pose-free reference views, and generalizes effectively to novel objects. Built on a multi-view transformer geometry backbone, PANY moves beyond pairwise matching by learning view-consistent geometry and cross-view alignment cues that remain stable under wide baselines and limited overlap. When additional unposed assist views are available, PANY aggregates them via pose-graph canonical registration to increase geometric coverage and reinforce the final pose. Extensive experiments show that PANY achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, substantially outperforming existing model-free methods, improving pose accuracy by +12% on YCB-V and over +20% on LM-O. Furthermore, PANY consistently performs well under both single-reference and sparse-reference settings, demonstrating strong robustness in real-world environments.

6D pose estimation is a key task in computer vision and embodied AI, widely used in robotic manipulation, augmented reality, etc. Existing methods directly regress in a high-dimensional continuous space, facing two key challenges in category-level pose estimation: limited accuracy due to noise and local optima, and inefficient search over an infinite space that hinders real-time performance. This paper proposes Flow6D, a hierarchical flow matching framework with a two-stage discrete latent space localization-continuous pose regression strategy. Rotation and translation parameters are first discretized into bins, with a discrete flow matching model locking the latent space around the true pose to reduce search complexity. Then, by sampling in the latent space, a continuous flow matching model predicts local pose residuals to optimize the estimate and regress to an accurate pose. The framework also naturally extends to articulated objects, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real datasets with real-time inference at 70 FPS. Project website: https://flow6d.github.io/.

Single-reference unseen object 6D pose estimation reduces object onboarding by estimating poses of arbitrary novel objects from only one reference view. Recent correspondence-based pipelines have achieved robust performance with vision foundation model (VFM) features. However, they typically treat these features as intra-view descriptors, leaving dense visual-semantic cues, including appearance, structure, and context, insufficiently exchanged across views before geometric decoding. Consequently, the decoded point features may lack joint semantic and geometric discriminability, making correspondence estimation still difficult in challenging cases. Instead of processing features independently, we build the correspondence pipeline around an early cross-view semantic prior. Specifically, cross-view semantic interaction (CVSI) enables dense query and reference VFM tokens to exchange semantic context and form a cross-view prior. Nevertheless, direct CVSI may disturb the VFM token structure, while the resulting semantic prior still needs 3D representation consistency for rigid correspondence. To make this CVSI prior reliable for 3D correspondence learning, we introduce two complementary training-time constraints: the intra-view structure preservation (IVSP) loss preserves the original intra-view token affinity structure during interaction, while the reference-anchored geometric consistency (RAGC) loss enforces spatial representation consistency of decoded point features. The final pose is recovered from learned correspondences through weighted SVD. We further construct a challenging view-pair protocol from the BOP Challenge datasets YCB-V and TUD-L to evaluate robustness in difficult matching scenarios. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks under different view-pair settings show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining comparable inference speed.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables robust transfer of knowledge from simulated to real environments while exploiting a subset of unlabeled target data to improve real-world performance. Existing UDA methods for Object pose estimation often rely on global feature matching, multi-stage larger frameworks, or image translation pipelines, which tend to overlook the pose-specific information embedded in feature representations. To bridge this limitation, we introduce CAPLR that targets the adaptation of pose-sensitive features in localized regions, ensuring that domain alignment preserves the geometric cues essential for accurate pose estimation. CAPLR achieves UDA with three key components: (1) Efficient Cross-Domain Pairing strategy leveraging intermediate features to identify pose similar image pairs across domains without supervision; (2) Contrastive Alignment to perform feature alignment at localised regions in both intermediate and task-specific representations; and (3) Consistency-Based Pseudo-Label Refinement to improve reliability by encouraging stable target predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAPLR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple well-known object pose estimation benchmarks featuring diverse and challenging scenarios.

In this work, we propose \methodname, an LLM-based model for fine-grained human motion understanding that represents motion as a sequence of skeletal poses with explicit timestamps for each pose. Each pose encodes body joint positions and is temporally grounded with timestamp tokens, allowing the model to reason about motion order, duration, and rhythm. To study what supervision is needed for motion-language reasoning, we construct a diverse training mixture spanning pose captioning, pose question answering, motion captioning, and motion question answering. Our ablations show that the primary gains come from the diversity of pose- and motion-level supervision, while staged training provides a smaller additional benefit. Different from previous works that rely on ground-truth 3D motion capture, our approach supports both 2D and 3D skeletal motion representations through a unified pose encoder, and can optionally incorporate video to provide contextual information. Extensive experiments on BABEL-QA, HuMMan-QA, CompMo, NTU-RGB+D, and QEVD-Coach demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of explicit temporal encoding and diverse pose- and motion-level supervision for fine-grained human motion understanding. Notably, even when using only 2D skeletal input, our approach surpasses previous 3D-based methods.

Pose-flow video anomaly detectors are attractive for one-class surveillance because they provide likelihood-based rankings for tracked skeleton windows. However, a single likelihood score may hide multimodal normal behavior and be sensitive to pose-observation noise. We study a frozen-detector setting in which the pose-flow backbone, cached skeleton tracks, and evaluation pipeline are fixed. Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration (RPC) is a post-hoc score calibration method for this setting. It adds a standardized nearest-prototype deviation in the frozen latent space to the standardized flow score, and uses keypoint confidence only to gate this added geometric evidence. Thus, RPC preserves the original density signal while correcting the ranking with empirical normal-mode structure under pose reliability. Across two frozen pose-flow backbones and four datasets, RPC improves frame-level AUROC in all eight backbone-dataset pairs, with gains ranging from 0.34 to 4.49 percentage points and averaging 2.03 points. Ablation and reliability analyses show that prototype deviation is the main corrective signal, while reliability gating is most useful when pose observations are less trustworthy. These results suggest that lightweight post-hoc calibration can strengthen cached pose-flow systems when retraining or reproducing the full pose pipeline is impractical.

We propose a hybrid grasp synthesis framework that combines a learning-based Energy-Based Model (EBM) with an analytical Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method to generate robust grasps from partially observed point clouds. The learned energy function acts as a prior within a Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) framework, guiding iterative refinement of grasp configurations. Evaluated on 67 objects with 5,360 grasp attempts, our method achieves an average success rate of 60.9%, outperforming AnyGrasp (31.1%) and Grasp Pose Detection (48.4%) and AS-ICP (56.6%). These results highlight the strong generalization ability of our approach and demonstrate how combining data-driven learning with geometric optimization addresses the limitations of either strategy in isolation.

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

This work explores the use of artificial intelligence in mobile robotics to achieve autonomous detection and pose estimation of load carriers for automated pickup. A deep neural network is designed to recognize predefined landmarks on the carrier from RGBD data; these landmarks are then used to compute the carrier's pose. The network operates directly on RGBD images to estimate landmark positions, which form the basis for determining the carrier's location. The approach is validated in extensive experiments and comprises both software and hardware implementations. A deep learning-based framework is presented to detect load carriers and estimate their pose for use with autonomous logistics vehicles. Our method uses a convolutional neural network to identify characteristic reference points on the carrier from RGBD input and computes its pose by combining these inferred landmarks with prior geometric knowledge. Experiments show that the resulting accuracy is sufficient for reliable load carrier detection in industrial environments, confirming the suitability of the method for autonomous intralogistics applications.

Simultaneous 3D reconstruction and 6D object pose estimation from a single monocular image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In industrial settings, however, multiple instances of an object are often randomly arranged in bins, implicitly providing several views of the same object within a single image. We show that this implicit multi-view geometry can be exploited to simultaneously reconstruct the object in 3D and estimate the 6D pose of each visible object instance. We present MooMIns, a new Gaussian-splatting-based approach that inverts the original Gaussian splatting formulation: instead of rendering a single scene from multiple cameras, we render multiple object instances from a single camera. Our method is initialized with SAM3 instance segmentation masks and a modified Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline. In contrast to learned monocular depth estimation, we perform true geometry-based reconstruction from image evidence, avoiding hallucinations caused by training data priors. We evaluate MooMIns on synthetic and real bin-picking scenarios, and demonstrate accurate reconstruction of previously unseen objects as well as reliable pose estimation of individual instance

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing strawberry 6D pose estimation studies have therefore relied mainly on synthetic data, leaving their in-field performance unquantified. In this work, we obtain ground truth indirectly, by recovering camera poses via PnP, reconstructing each scene at metric scale, and annotating a single 3D bounding box per strawberry that is propagated across all frames, yielding, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground-truth dataset of red-stage strawberries collected at an actual strawberry farm (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Despite this improved simulation setup, models trained on synthetic data alone fail to transfer to in-field images, while introducing a small amount of real data improves both translation and rotation accuracy across all backbones. Under the monocular RGB setting evaluated here, rotation is largely recovered once real data is used, and depth is what limits pose accuracy. These baselines across backbone encoders serve as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/WoojungSon/FieldStraw6D, and the data-collection pipeline is available at https://github.com/wjson2435/FieldStraw6D-pipeline.

With the advancement of visual sensing systems, computer vision is playing an increasingly important role in autonomous driving and robot navigation. Relative pose estimation in multi-camera systems is essential for accurate vehicle localization and environment perception, demanding high real-time performance and robustness. Existing methods, however, often involve high computational costs and rely heavily on abundant feature matches, limiting their applicability in time-sensitive driving scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a unified framework for efficient relative pose estimation, built upon a novel translation parameterization and first-order rotation approximation. Within this framework, we propose three efficient minimal solvers specifically designed for autonomous vehicles. The first solver integrates the vertical direction prior from Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), the second utilizes the rotation axis direction prior during steering maneuvers, and the third is designed for planar motion - a realistic assumption for ground vehicles operating on structured roads. By reducing both the minimal number of point correspondences and the algebraic complexity, our methods enable faster hypothesis generation within RANSAC-based pipelines, improving suitability for real-time systems. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and the KITTI autonomous driving benchmark demonstrate that the proposed solvers achieve a favorable balance between speed and accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Estimating the relative poses of multi-camera systems is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with critical applications in autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing solutions often suffer from high computational complexity or rely on an excessive number of point correspondences, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these limitations, we propose two efficient minimal solvers for estimating the relative poses of multi-camera systems using a novel parameterization. The first solver leverages the vertical direction prior provided by Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), while the second utilizes the rotation axis direction prior from IMUs. Our methods require only four point correspondences and reduce the problem of multi-camera relative pose estimation to solving a univariate 6th-degree polynomial, a significant improvement over existing approaches, which typically involve 8th-degree polynomials. This reduction in computational complexity and correspondence requirements makes our solvers particularly effective when integrated into RANSAC frameworks, demonstrating strong potential for visual odometry applications. Through rigorous evaluations on synthetic data and the KITTI benchmark, our methods achieved superior computational efficiency and competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Multi-camera systems are increasingly adopted in robotics and autonomous navigation for their wide field of view, flexibility, and fault tolerance. Nevertheless, existing PnP solvers fail to handle multiple projection centers. This paper introduces a virtual point formulation that bridges the standard PnP and generalized pose problems, enabling a unified pipeline that transforms existing PnP solvers into generalized pose solvers. Based on this framework, we derive three Virtual-point-based Generalized Pose solvers, namely VGPc, VGPq, and VGPr, leveraging Cayley, quaternion, and rotation-matrix parameterizations, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed solvers inherit the accuracy and efficiency of original PnP algorithms while significantly outperforming existing generalized solvers. Specifically, VGPc achieves higher estimation accuracy under heteroscedastic noise conditions, VGPq maintains global optimality, whereas VGPr provides superior computational efficiency without accuracy degradation.

Robotic grasping is a fundamental capability in robotic manipulation. Yet grasping remains challenging under partial observations. Reliable grasping depends on both local contact cues and object-level 3D structure. Existing geometry-aware grasping methods recognize the value of reconstruction, but they typically treat geometry as an intermediate prediction rather than a reusable object prior for grasping. In this paper, we present GraspFoM, a unified framework that leverages 3D foundation priors (SAM3D) to build a shared 3D object latent for both reconstruction and grasp pose prediction. Built on this shared object latent, we introduce an anchor-initialized truncated pose-reasoning diffuser that predicts continuous and multimodal grasp poses without directly relying on discrete grasp candidates. We further investigate the interaction between reconstruction and grasping through a reconstruction-aware scorer and a residual latent updater. Reconstruction provides grounded geometric cues, while grasp supervision refines the shared object latent toward grasp-relevant affordances. GraspFoM jointly predicts grasp poses and reconstructs high-fidelity 3D assets in mesh and 3DGS forms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GraspFoM achieves state-of-the-art results on both reconstruction and grasping. Notably, these improvements require only a small number of additional trainable parameters. Component-wise ablation studies also demonstrate the contribution of each component.

Recovering the relative 6-DoF pose between two image groups underlies cross-sequence relocalization and multi-camera rig odometry. Each group carries known intra-group geometry from visual odometry or rig calibration, and pretrained multi-view backbones already fuse such geometry into visual features. Yet current models treat all views as an unstructured set, leaving cross-group reasoning as the missing piece. We introduce G2G, which keeps the foundation model entirely frozen and adds three lightweight trainable modules to bridge the two groups: a perceiver resampler, a cross-group bridge with merged self-attention, and a multi-frame pose head. The trainable footprint totals about 32M parameters, under 6% of the full model, and is supervised only by relative poses. Across four datasets that span indoor and outdoor simulation, real-world cross-season capture, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, G2G attains state-of-the-art accuracy on both tasks, while trainable baselines are retrained with their original supervision. Code and visualizations: https://github.com/WeiYuFei0217/G2G.

We are surrounded by various objects with movable, articulated parts, e.g., box, handle, door. An accurate and generalizable perception of articulated parts is essential to enhance robotic manipulation capabilities. Building on this need, recent efforts in articulated parts perception have followed two main directions: One line of work uses pose-based representation, which requires high manual cost; in parallel, affordance-based methods extract future object motion from point tracking without additional manual efforts, but suffer from low-quality data. In this paper, we propose a new representation of articulated parts, Geometric Primary Structure (GPS), an abstraction of the part geometry structure to balance scalability and quality. For efficient and scalable data collection, GPS is integrated with a portable Virtual Reality (VR) device and requires only one minute to annotate one object sequence. This direct human annotation provides higher quality than the estimated affordance. With this efficient VR-GPS system, we collect 41K frames for 234 objects across six part classes, and train a generalizable GPS model with a single RGB-D object image as input. For object manipulation, we deploy a heuristic policy based on GPS prediction. Without any in-domain fine-tuning, our method achieves an 73% success rate, covering 270 initial states for 9 objects. Our code, data and reusable tool are available at https://enlighten0707.github.io/gps.

In this paper, we propose a cross-view fusion framework that enhances the robustness of 6-DoF grasp pose estimation in corner views. Our framework alleviates occlusion by incorporating an auxiliary view and avoids the time-consuming, task-agnostic multi-view reconstruction through a post-fusion strategy. To enhance cross-view fusion, we propose a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy that leverages cross-view associations to regularize point cloud features. In brief, a cross-view point pair is considered a match if the two points correspond to the same 3D location, and a non-match if they represent distinct grasp directions. The learning strategy significantly enhances the spatial consistency and direction distinctiveness of point features, thereby facilitating cross-view fusion and improving estimation robustness. Furthermore, we propose a cross-view-aligned cylinder integration module to fuse grasp-relevant geometry into a comprehensive representation. Specifically, the module first aligns the cross-view points and features according to their similarity to enhance the robustness against noise. Subsequently, these points are registered into the cylindrical coordinate frame, emphasizing the rotation-symmetric geometry which is important for grasping. Finally, local self-attention and seed cross-attention layers are alternately employed, respectively enabling interactions within single views and across views, which supports fine-grained representation of grasp-relevant geometry. Our framework achieves strong performance on the GraspNet-1Billion benchmark and in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/KJZhuAutomatic/Cross-view-Grasp.

Object insertion aims to seamlessly composite a reference object into a specified region of a background image. Recent diffusion-based methods achieve high visual quality but formulate insertion as a simple 2D inpainting task, providing no explicit control over the object's 3D pose and limiting their practical applicability. We propose DIRECT (Decomposed Injection for Reference Composition and Target-integration), a novel framework that integrates interactive pose manipulation with high-fidelity 2D image synthesis to enable pose-controllable object insertion. Our method decomposes the insertion conditions into three complementary components: appearance guidance capturing visual details from the reference object, geometry guidance derived from the user-adjusted 3D proxy, and context guidance from the target background. By injecting them through separate pathways, DIRECT avoids feature entanglement and simultaneously preserves reference appearance, follows the user-specified pose, and adapts the object to the target scene. We also introduce an automated data construction pipeline to improve the diversity and quality of training data. Experiments show that DIRECT outperforms previous methods in both geometric controllability and visual quality.

Measuring the angle between bone structures is a routine task in medical image analysis and provides a key quantitative parameter for diagnosis and treatment planning. Automated methods can reduce time and cost while improving reproducibility. In this work, we address automatic bone pose estimation using a learning-based point candidate proposal followed by a line model to extract axis parameters. Since conventional line models such as least squares are sensitive to outliers, we incorporate false-positive reduction strategies and robust fitting techniques, such as RANSAC and Hough transforms, to improve robustness. We evaluate our method on three clinically relevant paediatric angle estimation tasks: fracture fragment assessment in radiographs and ultrasound and developmental dysplasia of the hip evaluation in ultrasound using the Graf method. Our approach achieves mean errors of $4.1^\circ$, $5.4^\circ$, and $5.51^\circ$, respectively, not only remaining within the expected clinical observer variability, but also significantly outperforming landmark-based methods. Our code and annotations for fracture angle assessment in radiographs are publicly available on GitHub.

High-quality dynamic human pose annotation equips AI with precise motion kinematics to enable human behavior mastery, yet remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. Current annotation tools either lack temporal correction propagation or fail in multi-person scenarios, necessitating excessive manual intervention. In this paper, we introduce IMPose, an interactive tool for multi-person dynamic pose annotation. It features a dual-level tracking mechanism that propagates one-frame multi-person pose corrections from annotators across entire videos. The keypoint-level ensures corrections temporal propagation via sequential modeling, while the instance-level employs keypoint-aware embedding with relative positional encoding to maintain multi-person cross-frame consistency. To further improve robustness, IMPose maintains historical pose and instance cues in a trajectory bank, which enhances long-range temporal association and stabilizes annotation in challenging cases such as occlusion and motion blur. By converting sparse human corrections into dense and coherent pose trajectories, our framework significantly reduces repeated manual refinement across frames. Extensive experiments show that IMPose consistently achieves a strong accuracy efficiency trade off under different interaction budgets, demonstrating particular advantages in low click annotation settings. IMPose achieves high precision annotation with high efficiency, requiring only 27 clicks per 1,050 frame video on 3DPW and 3 clicks per tracklet per 84-frame on PoseTrack21. We further expand PoseTrack21 with 188K pose instances (3.55M keypoints) at a minimal cost of 10 annotators in 10 hours. The annotation tool, codes, and extended dataset will be open-sourced.

LiDAR odometry is a fundamental component of autonomous robotic systems, relying on geometric registration between consecutive point clouds to estimate ego-motion. However, traditional geometric approaches often degrade in dynamic or unstructured environments due to unreliable correspondences caused by moving objects, sparse geometric features, vegetation, and semantically ambiguous structures. Existing works have shown that, some of these limitations can be addressed by introducing semantic information from the environment in the registration process. In this work, we build on this, and show that not all elements in the environment are equally relevant for registration. Hence, we propose a semantic class-weighted ICP for LiDAR odometry. Instead of strictly filtering out points belonging to specific semantic classes, the proposed approach weights the residuals of points belonging to semantic categories based on their expected geometric stability. This strategy enables informative but potentially unstable structures, to contribute to the registration process while mitigating the influence of dynamic objects. The experimental evaluation was conducted on the SemanticKITTI and RELLIS-3D datasets, which include urban, highway, rural, and off-road environments. The empirical results show that the proposed Semantic-weighted ICP improves pose estimation, especially in challenging off-road scenarios where conventional rigid features are scarce. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that the effectiveness of this weighting strategy is highly environment-dependent, influenced by the structural and semantic composition of the scene.

Object pose estimation is a fundamental problem for an agent system to perceive or manipulate objects in images or videos. However, current instance-level methods struggle with generalization to unseen objects. Category-level methods seek to address this, but remain constrained by the complexities of learning in the non-linear Sim(3) space and intra-class variations. To address these challenges, We propose an effective method for category-level object pose estimation with two key innovations: (1) A translation/size estimator, featuring a semantic-guided symmetry-aware module that leverages robust generalization capabilities of a large vision model (LVM) to infer symmetry points, resulting in accurate translation and size without shape priors. This result serves as a precomputed cue for rotation estimation, thereby reducing the difficulty of learning in the non-linear Sim(3) space and laying a robust foundation for tackling the inherently more challenging rotation estimation. (2) A feature fusion module, based on our proposed spherical large-kernel inception convolution, fuses semantic features from the LVM with systematically computed geometric features to extract essential pose features from intra-class variations by modeling long-range dependencies without excessive computational cost. Built on these innovations, we achieve SOTA on benchmarks and real-world scenes, while developing a robust robotic picking system capable of handling diverse objects. Our code will be available at the project page: {\hypersetup{urlcolor=blue}https://panfei-cheng.github.io/SSH-Pose}.

Existing methods for category-level object articulation from a single 3D observation often rely on dense supervision, multi-frame inputs, or CAD templates, and still struggle to disentangle geometry from articulation or to recover explicit joint parameters. We propose SCAPO, a self-supervised framework that estimates canonical geometry, rigid part segmentation, and joint pivots, axes, and articulation states from a single RGB-D observation without ground-truth labels or category-specific models. Our SCAPO first uses an SE(3)-equivariant vector-neuron autoencoder to factor out global pose and align diverse instances into a shared canonical space. On this aligned shape, a joint-aware blend-skinning module is then designed to model part motion. We learn this representation through cycle reconstruction between observed and canonical shapes and cross-space alignment with a learnable canonical template that decouples shared category geometry from instance-specific residual shape. Experiments on synthetic and real articulated-object datasets show that our SCAPO recovers consistent part structure and accurate articulation parameters and outperforms all self-supervised baselines.

Orientation-aware manipulation is essential in post-harvest agricultural processing, where produce must be grasped and placed in consistent configurations. This paper presents ROG-Grasp, a geometry-based robotic grasping and placement framework that estimates the produce orientation from root surface geometry using RGB-D perception. A YOLO-based root detector and point cloud plane fitting are used to infer the root normal, enabling stable grasp pose generation and orientation-constrained Cartesian motion planning. Experiments on tomatoes and onions demonstrate high success rates and stable execution time in both isolated and cluttered scenarios. Compared with vision-language-action (VLA) policies, the proposed method achieves more reliable and accurate grasp completion with faster execution. These results highlight the effectiveness of geometry-driven perception for practical orientation-controlled manipulation tasks. A video of our paper is available online https://youtu.be/Ir2UtGODdMo.

We present our approach to the FIFA Skeletal Tracking Challenge 2026, which requires estimating 3D world-space poses of soccer players from broadcast video. Our method finetunes SMPLest-X (ViT-H, 687 M parameters) via a stratified clip split, multi-task depth supervision, and broadcast augmentation, paired with a RAFT dense optical flow camera tracker, foot-plane anchoring, and two-pass temporal smoothing. Against the FIFA baseline score of 1.053 on the validation set, SMART achieves 0.647, a 38.6% improvement; on the held-out test set, SMART scores 0.593 (Global MPJPE: 0.324 m, Local MPJPE: 0.054 m).

Robotics manipulation usually assumes that the shape and pose of the object are known to the robot prior to motion planning. However, precise geometric information is not always available in practice, and pose inference suffers from sensor uncertainties and view occlusion. In this work, we propose a unified model-based geometric framework integrating robotic haptic perception, modeling, and manipulation planning. Our novelties involve: \textit{i)} Introducing Bayesian Optimization (BO) to guide the haptic exploration for object shape inference, where superellipses are used to approximate geometric boundary; \textit{ii)} Adaptive formulation of manipulation potential encoding object geometry for quasi-static robot-object interaction; \textit{iii)} Proposing an online Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) for real-time pose inference based on model prediction and tactile feedback. We deploy our system on a 2D robotic sorting task, and vary object geometries to validate the robustness and generalizability of our framework in both simulation and a real-world multi-arm setup.

Monocular 6-DoF spacecraft pose estimation methods predominantly process individual frames, discarding the temporal information present in an image sequence acquired during spacecraft manoeuvres. Few temporal approaches require full backbone fine-tuning or auxiliary optical flow networks, risking catastrophic forgetting or increasing computational cost, respectively. We propose TALON (Token-Aligned Lightweight adapters for Orbital Navigation): spatiotemporal 3D adapters injected before the self-attention layers of a frozen ViT vision transformer, combined with a patch-token alignment loss that geometrically grounds the adapted features to keypoint structure through a prototype-conditioned KL-divergence objective. Pre-attention placement allows the frozen attention to reason over temporally enriched tokens, achieving stronger performance with a single adapter per block than post-attention alternatives. The alignment loss shapes the intermediate representations so that each keypoint induces a spatially precise activation in the token field, while the framework adds less than 5% parameters to the frozen backbone. On SPADES dataset, TALON reduces the pose error by 50% over the prior state-of-the-art, and on SwissCube dataset it surpasses the prior best by 21.8% in ADD-0.1d accuracy. Zero-shot cross-domain evaluation from sim-to-real on SPARK real data reduces pose error by 4.7x, and ablations characterise the role of adapter depth across in-domain and cross-domain settings.

Estimating the 9D pose of everyday objects from a single real-world image remains challenging. This is largely due to the lack of large-scale supervision. Most existing datasets either rely heavily on synthetic renderings or provide limited coverage of real-world objects: the largest real-world 9D pose dataset to date contains only 17K annotated objects across 9 categories. We address this gap with Every9D-21M, a dataset of 9D pose annotations for 21.8M real-world images from 109K object- centric videos spanning 700 everyday object categories - two orders of magnitude larger than prior real-world 9D pose benchmarks in both image and category count. To achieve this scale, we leverage object-centric videos by reconstructing object- level point clouds via multi-view geometry and aligning similar instances into a shared canonical coordinate frame. Canonical poses are manually annotated for only a small set of reference objects (fewer than 0.01% of all images) and propagated to the remaining instances via cross-instance alignment. All propagated canonical poses are then verified from multiple viewpoints. We further introduce cross-category orientation rules that induce category-level symmetries, enabling symmetry-aware evaluation. Beyond establishing dedicated training and evaluation splits as a benchmark for 9D pose foundation models, we show that training on Every9D-21M improves performance on ImageNet3D and PASCAL3D+, and generalizes to HANDAL substantially better than training on ImageNet3D. Data and code are available at https://github.com/GenIntel/Every9D.

The problem of object pose and shape estimation has seen key advancements lately. Encoder-decoder (e.g., SAM3D, LRM, CRISP) and diffusion-based models (e.g., InstantMesh, Zero123, SceneComplete) have shown category-agnostic shape encoding capacity and open-set generalizability. In this work, we ask the question: Are the object pose and shape estimation methods mature enough, such that when used with antipodal grasp sampling, can outperform the end-to-end grasp synthesis methods? We explore this question in detail by scoping our study to parallel jaw grippers, 7-DoF grasps, and single-view RGB(-D) image as input. We implement and compare a state-of-the-art, end-to-end grasp synthesis method and three modular methods, which first estimate the object pose and shape for all objects in the scene, and generate grasps using antipodal sampling. We observe that the modular methods outperform the end-to-end method in all our experiments. The modular methods are able to synthesize plenty of grasps, even for small objects, where the end-to-end methods fail. The effectiveness of the modular methods is contingent on the accuracy of the pose and shape estimation, and suffers partial degradation in cluttered scenes - a limitation of the existing pose and shape estimation methods. We also analyze the failure modes and run-times for the three modular methods, which use two different ways of object pose and shape estimation: one based on an encoder-decoder model, while another a diffusion model. Finally, we demonstrate that the single-view object pose and shape estimation methods can be augmented with vision-language models to yield language-conditioned grasps from just single-view RGB-D image as input. We notice comparable performance to the state-of-the-art LERF-TOGO baseline.

Surgical instrument pose estimation provides crucial information for promising applications, including autonomous robotic surgery, skill assessment, and standardization of surgical workflow. However, this task remains highly challenging due to high precision requirements, frequent occlusions, textureless instruments, scarcity of depth information and very limited annotated data. These constraints often lead to unsatisfactory performance when employing general object pose estimation approaches to surgical scenarios. To address these issues, we first construct a new dataset SynSurg6D, to alleviate the data shortage in this task. We further propose SurfSurg6D, a dense-correspondence framework tailored for surgical instrument pose estimation. Experimental results on the SurgRIPE, EndoVis2018 and SurgPose datasets demonstrate that the introduction of our generated dataset SynSurg6D is able to diversify the pose distributions, thus enhancing the performance of existing approaches. Furthermore, SurfSurg6D outperforms existing methods, providing a robust solution for precise and efficient RGB-only pose estimation.

Category-level object pose estimation aims to predict the pose and size of arbitrary objects in specific categories. Existing methods struggle with the inherent incompleteness of observed point clouds, which limits their ability to capture complete object shapes for robust pose reasoning. While point cloud completion offers a promising solution, naively treating it as a separate preprocessing step for partial observations introduces compounding errors and additional computational overhead, ultimately hindering both accuracy and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose ComPose, a novel unified framework that tightly integrates shape completion to provide complete geometric cues for enhanced pose estimation. At the core of ComPose is a keypoint-based progressive completion module, which recovers full shape representations by progressively predicting a sparse set of keypoints and their surrounding dense point sets, empowering the keypoints to capture holistic object geometries. A geometric relation encoding module further enriches keypoint features with both local and global geometric context. In addition, we introduce a novel geometric relation consistency loss to enforce structural alignment between observed keypoints and their predicted NOCS coordinates, ensuring globally coherent coordinate transformations. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches without relying on category-level shape priors.

Recent advances in imitation learning and vision-language models highlight the need for high-fidelity tactile perception, with 6-DoF tactile object pose estimation providing a crucial foundation for precise robotic manipulation. We introduce InvariantCloud, a 6-DoF pose estimation framework that leverages the global invariance of surface marker constellations on vision-based tactile sensors. In contrast to recent approaches, our one-shot globally invariant point cloud registration suppresses cumulative drift and overcomes long-standing limitations in accurately estimating yaw (Z-axis) rotation. Experimental verifications show that InvariantCloud achieves superior yaw tracking accuracy and re-localization repeatability compared to existing benchmarks, demonstrating its precision and robustness in long-sequence manipulation tasks.

A robot resolving ``put the cup on that one'' must fuse gesture, language, and scene geometry, yet 3D grounding benchmarks only partially capture this regime: descriptions are written post-hoc, gestures are templated, or pointing is staged for the camera. MM-Conv captures natural co-speech gesture from dyadic VR interaction alongside full-body motion capture and 3D scene graphs. We use it to evaluate pose-language fusion with a decoupled late-fusion architecture in which pose and text pathways share no learned parameters. The two choices together make category, pose, and text contributions easier to isolate through controlled ablations. Fusion with frozen MiniLM category embeddings exceeds pose alone and the best text-only pathway on every reference type, reaching 31.9% top-1. The learned scalar gate flips between opposing policies depending on whether the text pathway has category access. This is a reliability diagnostic: fusion-accuracy claims for semantic grounding systems are indistinguishable from category-representation artifacts unless pathways are architecturally decoupled.

Reconstructing the motion of objects from videos is a key component for embodied AI and robot manipulation. While diverse approaches to object pose tracking have been studied, they rely heavily on strong external priors, such as depth data or 3D templates, and remain highly vulnerable to severe occlusions by hand grasps despite the use of explicit masks. In this work, we present ComPose, a 6DoF object tracking framework designed for hand-aware object pose estimation from RGB video. Rather than treating the hand purely as an occluder, our method harmonizes hand motions as a \textit{complementary cue} for object tracking. In detail, we recover a variety of object motions over time by combining object and hand cues from foundation models within a unified tracking pipeline. Here, ComPose adaptively selects informative hand joints, combines object- and hand-derived cues for motion estimation, and refines the resulting object motion using visible geometric evidence and a learned correction. We further enforce the temporal consistency over both rotation and translation, yielding stable 3D object trajectories over time without any external smoothing. Extensive experiments show that our method is accurate, efficient, and robust under severe hand occlusion and geometric ambiguity. In addition, the resulting trajectories can also effectively transfer to downstream robot manipulation by enabling robots to reconstruct human actions from online videos.

Accurately reconstructing full-body poses from sparse head and hand trajectories is a foundational challenge for immersive AR/VR telepresence. Current methods often struggle with error accumulation and unnatural joint coordination, primarily because they treat the human body as a monolithic entity, thereby failing to capture the fine-grained ``atomic intents'' embedded in subtle signal variations and overlooking the inherent structural topology. To bridge this gap, we present AtomicMotion, a framework designed to decouple and re-integrate body dynamics through three core innovations. First, we introduce a logical body partitioning scheme that decomposes the skeleton into five distinct clusters based on functional intent; this ensures that each partition preserves internal joint synergies while isolating local motion primitives. Second, to robustly map sparse inputs to high-dimensional poses, we employ a masked full-body pre-conditioning strategy during training, forcing the model to internalize global skeletal topology and latent kinematic constraints. Finally, addressing the limitations of vanilla spatial attention, which often ignores fixed physiological connectivity, we propose Kinematic Attention. By embedding the classical kinematic tree structure into the attention mechanism, we ensure biological plausibility in the synthesized motions. Extensive evaluations on the AMASS dataset demonstrate that AtomicMotion significantly outperforms existing baselines, yielding higher reconstruction fidelity and superior biomechanical realism.

Spacecraft pose estimation networks require tens of thousands of CAD-rendered images to be trained. This reliance on synthetic CAD data (i) limits applicability to targets with reliable geometry prior, excluding uncooperative or poorly documented spacecraft, and (ii) causes poor generalization to real on-orbit conditions due to unrealistic illumination and material appearance. This paper introduces a NeRF-based image augmentation method that enables the learning of spacecraft pose estimators from only a few tens to a few hundreds of images. The method learns a Neural Radiance Field of the target and generates a large, diverse dataset through geometrically-consistent viewpoint and appearance augmentation. This augmented dataset enables the training of accurate target-specific pose estimators without requiring a CAD model or large synthetic datasets. Experiments show that our approach supports the training of accurate pose estimators from only 25 to 400 realistic images, even under severe illumination variations. When applied on large CAD-based synthetic datasets, the NeRF-based augmentation also enhances out-of-domain generalization, yielding improved robustness to real on-orbit conditions.

Accurate estimation of plant skeletal structures (e.g., branching structures) from images is essential for smart agriculture and plant science. Unlike human skeletons with fixed topology, plant skeleton estimation presents a unique challenge, i.e., estimating arbitrary tree graphs from images. To address this problem, we introduce PlantPose, a universal plant skeleton estimator via tree-constrained graph generation. PlantPose combines learning-based graph generation with traditional graph algorithms to enforce tree constraints during the training loop. To enhance the model's generalization capability, we curate a large and diverse dataset comprising real-world and synthetic plant images, along with simplified representations (e.g., sketches and abstract drawings). This dataset enables the generalized model to adapt to diverse input styles and categories of plant images while preserving topological consistency. Our approach demonstrates robust and accurate plant skeleton estimation across multiple domains, including previously unseen out-of-domain scenarios. Further analyses highlight the method's strengths and limitations in handling complex, heterogeneous data distributions. All implementations and datasets are available at https://github.com/huntorochi/PlantPose/.

Urgently needed generalizable robot object interaction and manipulation requires high-quality Cross-Category object perception. As a pioneer of this area, Generalizable and Actionable Parts (GAParts) understanding has attracted increasing attention from relevant researchers. However, most recent works either have insufficient design regarding the symmetry issue or require rich symmetry annotation, which severely impedes precise GAPart pose estimation in data-lacking scenarios. In this paper, we propose SAFAG, a novel Symmetry Annotation-Free framework for Generalizable and Actionable Parts Pose Estimation. Specifically, we suggest a stepwise refinement two-stage framework for candidate-to-final quaternion regression, and tackle the symmetry prediction as a probability distribution problem with self-supervised learning strategy. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of our SAFAG. We believe that our work has the enormous potential to be applied in many areas of embodied AI system.

Category-level 6D object pose estimation is typically formulated as a multi-category joint learning problem with fully shared model parameters. However, pronounced geometric heterogeneity across categories entangles incompatible optimization signals in shared modules, resulting in gradient conflicts and negative transfer during training. To address this challenge, we first introduce gradient-based diagnostics to quantify module-level cross-category contention. Building on results of diagnostics, we propose DecomPose, a difficulty-aware decomposition framework that mitigates optimization contention via: (1) difficulty-aware gradient decoupling, which groups categories using a data-driven difficulty proxy and routes each instance to a group-specific correspondence branch to isolate incompatible updates; and (2) stability-driven asymmetric branching, which assigns higher-capacity branches to structurally simple categories as stable optimization anchors while constraining complex categories with lightweight branches to suppress noisy updates and alleviate negative transfer. Extensive experiments on REAL275, CAMERA25, and HouseCat6D demonstrate that DecomPose effectively reduces cross-category optimization contention and delivers superior pose estimation performance across multiple benchmarks.

Category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) aims to localize keypoints on query images from arbitrary categories, using only a few annotated support examples for guidance. Recent approaches either treat keypoints as isolated entities or rely on manually defined skeleton priors, which are costly to annotate and inherently inflexible across diverse categories. Such oversimplification limits the model's capacity to capture instance-wise structural cues critical for accurate pixel-level localization. To overcome these limitations, we propose GenCape, a Generative-based framework for CAPE that infers keypoint relationships solely from image-based support inputs, without additional textual descriptions or predefined skeletons. Our framework consists of two principal components: an iterative Structure-aware Variational Autoencoder (i-SVAE) and a Compositional Graph Transfer (CGT) module. The former infers soft, instance-specific adjacency matrices from support features through variational inference, embedded layer-wise into the Graph Transformer Decoder for progressive structural priors refinement. The latter adaptively aggregates multiple latent graphs into a query-aware structure via Bayesian fusion and attention-based reweighting, enhancing resilience to visual uncertainty and support-induced bias. This structure-aware design facilitates effective message propagation among keypoints and promotes semantic alignment across object categories with diverse keypoint topologies. Experimental results on the MP-100 dataset show that our method achieves substantial gains over graph-support baselines under both 1- and 5-shot settings, while maintaining competitive performance against text-support counterparts.

In visual localization, Absolute Pose Regression (APR) enables real-time 6-DoF camera pose inference from single images, yet critically depends on fine-tuning data quality and coverage. While recent methods leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for novel view synthesis-based data augmentation, random sampling generates redundant views and noisy samples from poorly reconstructed regions. To mitigate this research gap, we propose PoseCompass, an intelligent pose selection pipeline for 3DGS-based APR. PoseCompass formulates synthetic pose selection and derives a value-based pose ranking mechanism to identify informative poses. The ranking integrates three dimensions: Localization Difficulty, favoring challenging regions; Coverage Novelty, exploring under-sampled areas; and Rendering Observability, filtering artifacts and noise. PoseCompass then generates trajectory-constrained candidates, selects the top-K ranked poses, and synthesizes views using 3DGS with lightweight diffusion-based alignment. Finally, the pose regressor is fine-tuned on mixed real and synthetic data. We evaluate PoseCompass on 7-Scenes, where it reduces adaptation time from 15.2 to 5.1 minutes, a 3x speedup, while cutting median pose errors by 53.8 percent and significantly outperforming random baselines.

We present a framework for distributed Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) by formulating the problem as a second-order continuous-time dynamical system evolving on Lie groups. By modeling pose variables as massive particles subject to damping, the equilibrium points of the resulting Riemannian dynamics coincide with first-order critical points of the original PGO problem. Using the governing damped Euler--Poincaré equations and a semi-implicit geometric integrator, we design an optimization algorithm that generalizes existing algorithms such as Riemannian gradient descent and Gauss--Newton. In multi-robot settings, we present a fully distributed and parallel method based on block-diagonal mass and damping matrices, where each robot solves an ordinary differential equation for its own poses with minimal communication overhead. Moreover, modeling both state and velocity enables principled neighbor prediction that significantly improves convergence under delayed communication. Theoretically, we present an analysis and establish sufficient condition that ensures energy dissipation under the employed geometric discretization scheme. Experiments on benchmark PGO datasets demonstrate that the proposed solver achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art distributed baselines in both synchronous and asynchronous regimes.

On-orbit servicing and active debris removal involving non-cooperative spacecraft require reliable pose estimation to supply accurate position and orientation data for autonomous visual navigation. Learning-based monocular methods have seen widespread adoption in spacecraft pose estimation, yet they suffer from an intrinsic depth ambiguity problem and tend to fail under the harsh illumination conditions routinely encountered in orbit. Active depth sensors could in principle address the geometric ambiguity, but their power and mass requirements make them poorly suited to most spacecraft platforms. This work addresses these issues through a passive stereo vision framework for six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) pose estimation of non-cooperative spacecraft. A binocular stereo matching network called TSCA-Stereo is developed to cope with weak-texture surfaces, specular highlights, and severe lighting variations typical of space imagery. A cross-modal fusion Transformer is introduced to combine RGB appearance information with stereo depth features in an adaptive manner, supporting reliable pose recovery. A synthetic binocular multimodal dataset is also built for the experiments, covering stereo disparity maps and 6-DOF pose annotations across a range of illumination scenarios, attitude configurations, and noise levels. Experimental results show that TSCA-Stereo outperforms the baseline across every evaluated metric on this space-specific dataset. The full pose estimation pipeline achieves a mean translation error of 0.0419 m and a mean orientation error of 0.8632° under varied imaging conditions, confirming that the passive stereo approach is both effective and resilient when operating under the demanding visual conditions of the space environment.

In this paper, we propose a modular framework for 6D pose estimation based on keypoint heatmap regression. Our approach combines YOLOv10m for object detection with a ResNet18-based network that predicts 2D heatmaps from RGB images. Keypoints extracted from these heatmaps are used to estimate the 6D object pose via the PnP RANSAC algorithm. We compare different keypoint selection strategies to assess their impact on pose accuracy. Additionally, we extend the baseline by incorporating depth data using a cross-fusion architecture, which enables interaction between RGB and depth features at multiple stages. We further explore general training improvements, such as experimenting with activation functions and learning rate scheduling strategies to improve model performance. Our best RGB-only model achieved a mean ADD-based accuracy of 84.50%, while the RGB-D fusion model reached 92.41% on the LINEMOD dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/ameermasood/HeatNet.

In many practical 6D object pose estimation scenarios, we often have access to only a single real-world RGB-D reference view per object, typically without CAD models. Existing methods largely rely on explicit 3D models or multi-view data, which limits their scalability. To address this challenging single-reference model-free setting, we propose \textbf{OneViewAll}, a semantic-prior-guided framework that performs pose estimation via a novel Project-and-Compare paradigm. Instead of relying on computationally expensive CAD-based rendering, our method directly aligns reference and query observations within a projection-equivariant space. OneViewAll progressively integrates hierarchical semantic priors across three levels: (1) \textit{category- and scene-level} priors for efficient hypothesis initialization; (2) \textit{object-level symmetry} priors for geometry completion via mirror fusion; and (3) \textit{patch-level} priors for discriminative refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OneViewAll achieves \textbf{92.5%} ADD-0.1 accuracy on the LINEMOD dataset using only one real reference view -- significantly outperforming the CVPR 2025 baseline One2Any (52.6%). It also yields consistent improvements on YCB-V, Real275, and Toyota-Light while maintaining low inference latency. Our results underscore the efficacy of symmetry-aware projection in handling symmetric, texture-less, and occluded objects.

This paper introduces the ensemble directional Kalman filter (EnDKF), an ensemble-based Kalman filtering approach for pose tracking that jointly estimates an object's position and attitude using ideas from directional statistics. The EnDKF integrates a unit-quaternion attitude representation to move beyond canonical Kalman filter mean and covariance assumptions that poorly capture directional uncertainty. Experiments on a synthetic constant-velocity constant-angular-velocity system and a digital-twin head-tracking scenario using the FoundationPose algorithm demonstrate a significant reduction in error as opposed to merely using measurements.

Single-view RGB object pose estimators have reached a level of precision and efficiency that makes them good candidates for vision-based robot control. However, off-the-shelf methods lack temporal consistency and robustness that are mandatory for a stable feedback control. In this work, we develop a factor graph approach to enforce temporal consistency of the object pose estimates. In particular, the proposed approach: (i) incorporates object motion models, (ii) explicitly estimates the object pose measurement uncertainty, and (iii) integrates the above two components in an online optimization-based estimator. We demonstrate that with appropriate outlier rejection and smoothing using the proposed factor graph approach, we can significantly improve the results on standardized pose estimation benchmarks. We experimentally validate the stability of the proposed approach for a feedback-based robot control task in which the object is tracked by the camera attached to a torque controlled manipulator.

This paper presents a dual quaternion framework for 6-DOF visual target tracking that addresses key limitations of perspective-n-point (P$n$P) solvers: sensitivity to noise and outliers, and inability to propagate estimates through measurement dropouts. A nonlinear observability analysis is performed using a Lie algebraic approach, deriving sufficient conditions for local observability under two sensing modalities: relative position vector and unit vector measurements. For the unit vector case, the classical collinear feature point degeneracy of the perspective-three-point problem is recovered through rank analysis of the observability codistribution matrix, providing a control-theoretic interpretation of a previously geometric result. A dual quaternion Lie group unscented Kalman filter is then developed, directly modeling relative dynamics without assumptions about cooperative measurements or slowly-varying motion. Simulations demonstrate improved pose estimation accuracy and robustness to occlusions compared to an off-the-shelf P$n$P solver. Results are broadly applicable to visual-inertial navigation, simultaneous localization and mapping, and P$n$P solver development.

In this paper, we introduce GET-2D-1.0, a fast grasp planner for the GET asymmetrical gripper that operates from a single-view RGB-D image, using the Ferrari-Canny metric and a novel sampling strategy, and GET-3D-1.0, a mesh-based method using a 3D gripper model and ray-tracing. We evaluate both grasp planners against baselines with physical experiments, which suggest that GET-2D-1.0 can improve over a bounding box baseline by over 40% in lift success, shake survival, and force resistance. Experiments with GET-3D-1.0 suggest slight improvement compared to GET-2D-1.0 on lift success and shake survival, but are more computationally expensive, averaging 17 seconds of planning compared to 683 ms for GET-2D-1.0.

We present RADIO-ViPE (Reduce All Domains Into One -- Video Pose Engine), an online semantic SLAM system that enables geometry-aware open-vocabulary grounding, associating arbitrary natural language queries with localized 3D regions and objects in dynamic environments. Unlike existing approaches that require calibrated, posed RGB-D input, RADIO-ViPE operates directly on raw monocular RGB video streams, requiring no prior camera intrinsics, depth sensors, or pose initialization. The system tightly couples multi-modal embeddings -- spanning vision and language -- derived from agglomerative foundation models (e.g., RADIO) with geometric scene information. This coupling takes place in initialization, optimization and factor graph connections to improve the consistency of the map from multiple modalities. The optimization is wrapped within adaptive robust kernels, designed to handle both actively moving objects and agent-displaced scene elements (e.g., furniture rearranged during ego-centric session). Experiments demonstrate that RADIO-ViPE achieves state-of-the-art results on the dynamic TUM-RGBD benchmark while maintaining competitive performance against offline open-vocabulary methods that rely on calibrated data and static scene assumptions. RADIO-ViPE bridges a critical gap in real-world deployment, enabling robust open-vocabulary semantic grounding for autonomous robotics and unconstrained in-the-wild video streams. Project page: https://be2rlab.github.io/radio_vipe

Many sign language translation (SLT) systems operate on pose sequences instead of raw video to reduce input dimensionality, improve portability, and partially anonymize signers. The choice of pose estimator is often treated as an implementation detail, with systems defaulting to widely available tools such as MediaPipe Holistic or OpenPose. We present a systematic comparison of pose estimators for pose-based SLT, covering widely used baselines (MediaPipe Holistic, OpenPose) and newer whole-body/high-capacity models (MMPose WholeBody, OpenPifPaf, AlphaPose, SDPose, Sapiens, SMPLest-X). We quantify downstream impact by training a controlled SLT pipeline on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014 where only the pose representation varies, evaluating with BLEU and BLEURT. To contextualize translation outcomes, we analyze temporal stability, missing hand keypoints, and robustness to occlusion using higher-resolution videos from the Signsuisse dataset. SDPose and Sapiens achieve the best translation performance (BLEU ~11.5), outperforming the common MediaPipe baseline (BLEU ~10). In occlusion cases, Sapiens is correct in all tested instances (15/15), while OpenPifPaf fails in nearly all (1/15) and also yields the weakest translation scores. Estimators that frequently leave out hand keypoints are associated with lower BLEU/BLEURT. We release code that can be used not only to reproduce our experiments, but also considerably lowers the barrier for other researchers to use alternative pose estimators.

Accurate 6-DoF pose estimation of objects is critical for robots to perform precise manipulation tasks. However, for dynamic object pose estimation, conventional camera-based approaches face several major challenges, such as motion blur, sensor noise, and low-light limitation. To address these issues, we employ event cameras, whose high dynamic range and low latency offer a promising solution. Furthermore, we propose a keypoint-based detection and tracking approach for dynamic object pose estimation. Firstly, a keypoint detection network is constructed to extract keypoints from the time surface generated by the event stream. Subsequently, the polarity and spatial coordinates of the events are leveraged, and the event density in the vicinity of each keypoint is utilized to achieve continuous keypoint tracking. Finally, a hash mapping is established between the 2D keypoints and the 3D model keypoints, and the EPnP algorithm is employed to estimate the 6-DoF pose. Experimental results demonstrate that, whether in simulated or real event environments, the proposed method outperforms the event-based state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness.

6D object pose estimation in cluttered scenes remains challenging due to severe occlusion and sensor noise. We propose MAPRPose, a two-stage framework that leverages mask-aware correspondences for pose proposal and amodal-driven Region-of-Interest (ROI) prediction for robust refinement. In the Mask-Aware Pose Proposal (MAPP) stage, we lift 2D correspondences into 3D space to establish reliable keypoint matches and generate geometrically consistent pose hypotheses based on correspondence-level scoring, from which the top-$K$ candidates are selected. In the refinement stage, we introduce a tensorized render-and-compare pipeline integrated with an Amodal Mask Prediction and ROI Re-Alignment (AMPR) module. By reconstructing complete object geometry and dynamically adjusting the ROI, AMPR mitigates localization errors and spatial misalignment under heavy occlusion. Furthermore, our GPU-accelerated RGB-XYZ reprojection enables simultaneous refinement of all $N \times B$ pose hypotheses in a single forward pass. Evaluated on the BOP benchmark, MAPRPose achieves a state-of-the-art Average Recall (AR) of 76.5%, outperforming FoundationPose by 3.1% AR while delivering a 43x speedup in multi-object inference.

Symmetric objects are common in daily life and industry, yet their inherent orientation ambiguities that impede the training of deep learning networks for pose estimation are rarely discussed in the literature. To cope with these ambiguities, existing solutions typically require the design of specific loss functions and network architectures or resort to symmetry-invariant evaluation metrics. In contrast, we focus on the numeric representation of the rotation itself, modifying trigonometric identities with the degrees of symmetry derived from the objects' shapes. We use our representation, SARR, to obtain canonic (symmetry-resolved) poses for the symmetric objects in two popular 6D pose estimation datasets, T-LESS and ITODD, where SARR is unique and continuous w.r.t. the visual appearance. This allows us to use a standard CNN for 3D orientation estimation whose performance is evaluated with the symmetry-sensitive cosine distance $\text{AR}_{\text{C}}$. Our networks outperform the state of the art using $\text{AR}_{\text{C}}$ and achieve satisfactory performance when using conventional symmetry-invariant measures. Our method does not require any 3D models but only depth, or, as part of an additional experiment, texture-less RGB/grayscale images as input. We also show that networks trained on SARR outperform the same networks trained on rotation matrices, Euler angles, quaternions, standard trigonometrics or the recently popular 6d representation -- even in inference scenarios where no prior knowledge of the objects' symmetry properties is available. Code and a visualization toolkit are available at https://github.com/akriegler/SARR .

Kinematic rigs provide a structured interface for articulating 3D meshes but lack any associated pose space, i.e., an explicit representation of the plausible manifold of joint configurations for a given mesh. Without such a pose space, stochastic sampling or manual manipulation of raw rig parameters easily results in semantic and/or geometric violations, such as anatomical hyperextension and non-physical self-intersections. We propose Video-informed Pose Spaces (ViPS), a feedforward framework that discovers the latent distribution of valid articulations for auto-rigged meshes by distilling motion priors from a pretrained video diffusion model. Unlike existing methods that rely on scarce, artist-authored 4D datasets, or focus on reconstructing instances of individual motions, ViPS transfers generative video model priors into a universal distribution over the given rig parameterization. Differentiable geometric validators applied to the skinned mesh enforce shape-specific integrity without requiring manual regularizers. Our feedforward model reveals a smooth, compact, and controllable pose space. This, in turn, supports sampling for diverse shape variations, manifold projection for inverse kinematics, and temporally coherent trajectories for animation and keyframing. Further, the distilled 3D pose samples serve as semantic proxies to guide video diffusion, effectively closing the loop between generative 2D priors and structured 3D kinematic control. Our evaluations show that ViPS, trained solely using video priors, matches the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on synthetic artist-created 4D data in both plausibility and diversity. Additionally, as a universal model, ViPS exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution species and unseen skeletal topologies.

Category-level object pose estimation is fundamental for embodied intelligence, yet achieving robust generalization to unseen instances remains challenging. However, existing methods mainly rely on simple feature extraction and aggregation, which struggle to capture category-shared topological structures and conduct semantic keypoint modeling, limiting their generalization. To address these, we propose a \textbf{T}opology-Aware Learning with \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{M}amba for Category-Level \textbf{P}ose Estimation framework (TSM-Pose). Specifically, we introduce a Topology Extractor to capture the global topological representation of the point cloud, which is integrated into local geometry features and enables robust category-level structural representation. Simultaneously, we propose a Mamba-based Global Semantic Aggregator that injects semantics priors into keypoints to enhance their expressiveness and leverages multiple TwinMamba blocks to model long-range dependencies for more effective global feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (REAL275, CAMERA25, and HouseCat6D) demonstrate that TSM-Pose outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Solving non-linear least-squares problem for pose estimation (rotation and translation) is often a time consuming yet fundamental problem in several real-time computer vision applications. With an adequate rotation parametrization, the optimization problem can be reduced to the solution of a~system of polynomial equations and solved in closed form. Recent advances in efficient closed form solvers utilizing resultant matrices have shown a promising research direction to decrease the computation time while preserving the estimation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new class of resultant-based solvers that exploit Sylvester forms to further reduce the complexity of the resolution. We demonstrate that our proposed methods are numerically as accurate as the state-of-the-art solvers, and outperform them in terms of computational time. We show that this approach can be applied for pose estimation in two different types of problems: estimating a pose from 3D to 3D correspondences, and estimating a pose from 3D points to 2D points correspondences.

Regrasp planning is often required when one pick-and-place cannot transfer an object from an initial pose to a goal pose while maintaining grasp feasibility. The main challenge is to reason about shared-grasp connectivity across intermediate poses, where discrete search becomes brittle. We propose an implicit multi-step regrasp planning framework based on differentiable pose sequence connectivity metrics. We model grasp feasibility under an object pose using an Energy-Based Model (EBM) and leverage energy additivity to construct a continuous energy landscape that measures pose-pair connectivity, enabling gradient-based optimization of intermediate object poses. An adaptive iterative deepening strategy is introduced to determine the minimum number of intermediate steps automatically. Experiments show that the proposed cost formulation provides smooth and informative gradients, improving planning robustness over other alternatives. They also demonstrate generalization to unseen grasp poses and cross-end-effector transfer, where a model trained with suction constraints can guide parallel gripper grasp manipulation. The multi-step planning results further highlight the effectiveness of adaptive deepening and minimum-step search.