Overview

Object pose estimation determines where an object is and how it is oriented, often as a 6D pose and sometimes including its size or articulation. Methods use keypoints or dense correspondences with geometric solvers such as PnP and ICP, alongside learned RGB-D and point-cloud models, foundation features, and generative pose prediction. Symmetry-aware representations, temporal tracking, and tactile or multi-view cues help address occlusion and ambiguous geometry, with benchmarks such as BOP, LINEMOD, and NOCS testing different settings. A central challenge is making systems generalize beyond familiar objects and controlled benchmarks to cluttered, deformable, reflective, or otherwise changing real-world scenes while remaining reliable for tasks such as robotic grasping.

Latest papers

187 papers25 papers in the last four weeks, up 47% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Nov 19, 2025

AnyBox: Efficient Zero-Shot 9DoF Pose Estimation of Boxes for Robotic Manipulation

Recovering the 9D pose of objects, both their 6D pose and 3D dimensions, under clutter and occlusion is a core requirement for warehouse automation, logistics, and manufacturing. Model-based methods are accurate but assume an instance-specific CAD model for every object, which is costly to maintain as inventories change. Model-free and category-level methods relax this assumption, yet they remain vulnerable to the symmetry, weak texture, and heavy occlusion that characterize stacked storage boxes, and they ignore the strong structural priors such scenes provide. We present AnyBox, an efficient zero-shot framework that exploits the geometric regularity of boxes to jointly recover pose and dimensions from a single RGB-D observation. Starting from a canonical category template, AnyBox alternates between pose and scale estimation, using the discrepancy between the reprojected template and the observed mask to drive a binary search over box dimensions. Two lightweight components make this practical: a depth-consistency filter that rejects the implausible hypotheses induced by box symmetry, and an early-stopping rule that replaces the remaining search with a single closed-form update. On public benchmarks and an in-house warehouse dataset, AnyBox improves detection AP by up to 36 points, more than doubling the previous best, and approaches instance-level pipelines that have access to ground-truth CAD models. These gains transfer downstream, raising success by 28% on a cluttered robotic box-shelving task.
Aug 29, 2025

ECHO: Ego-Centric modeling of Human-Object interactions

Modeling human-object interactions (HOI) from an egocentric perspective is a critical yet challenging task, particularly when relying on sparse signals from wearable devices like smart glasses and watches. We present ECHO, the first unified framework to jointly recover human pose, object motion, and contact dynamics solely from head and wrist tracking. To tackle the underconstrained nature of this problem, we introduce a novel tri-variate diffusion process with independent noise schedules that models the mutual dependencies between the human, object, and interaction modalities. This formulation allows ECHO to operate with flexible input configurations, making it robust to intermittent tracking and capable of leveraging partial observations. Crucially, it enables training on a combination of large-scale human motion datasets and smaller HOI collections, learning strong priors while capturing interaction nuances. Furthermore, we employ a smooth inpainting inference mechanism that enables the generation of temporally consistent interactions for arbitrarily long sequences. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ECHO achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods lacking such flexibility. The project page is available at https://ptrvilya.github.io/echo/.
Jun 12, 2025

Occlusion-Aware 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Masked AutoEncoders

Hand-object pose estimation from monocular RGB images remains a significant challenge mainly due to the severe occlusions inherent in hand-object interactions. Existing methods do not sufficiently explore global structural perception and reasoning, which limits their effectiveness in handling occluded hand-object interactions. To address this challenge, we propose an occlusion-aware hand-object pose estimation method based on masked autoencoders, termed as HOMAE. Specifically, we propose a target-focused masking strategy that imposes structured occlusion on regions of hand-object interaction, encouraging the model to learn context-aware features and reason about the occluded structures. We further integrate multi-scale features extracted from the decoder to predict a signed distance field (SDF), capturing both global context and fine-grained geometry. To enhance geometric perception, we combine the implicit SDF with an explicit point cloud derived from the SDF, leveraging the complementary strengths of both representations. This fusion enables more robust handling of occluded regions by combining the global context from the SDF with the precise local geometry provided by the point cloud. Extensive experiments on challenging DexYCB and HO3Dv2 benchmarks demonstrate that HOMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance in hand-object pose estimation. We will release our code and model.
May 31, 2025

XYZ-IBD: Benchmarking Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation under Real-World Industrial Complexity

While current 6D pose estimation benchmarks have reached near-saturation on household objects, they often fail to capture the stochastic and optical complexities of industrial environments. We introduce XYZ-IBD, a high-precision benchmark for object detection and 6D pose estimation specifically designed for industrial bin-picking. XYZ-IBD addresses the domain gap by providing 75 multi-view real-world scenes containing approximately 273k annotated instances of metallic, symmetrical, and specular objects. Unlike existing datasets, our benchmark features high-density stochastic stacking and multi-instance ambiguity, reflecting authentic robotic manipulation challenges. We employ a rigorous multi-stage and semi-automatic annotation pipeline, ensuring sub-millimeter annotation accuracy. The annotations are validated through our designed error quantification scheme, securing the reliability of the annotation quality. In addition to real-world evaluation data, we provide a large-scale complementary synthetic training set that is rendered under a realistic bin-picking simulation. Benchmarking state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for 2D detection and 6D pose estimation reveals a significant performance degradation compared to standard household benchmarks, highlighting the unsolved challenges of industrial vision. XYZ-IBD establishes a new frontier for robust pose estimation in complex, high-occlusion, and reflective scenarios. The dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://xyz-ibd.github.io.
Apr 9, 2025

DLTPose: 6DoF Pose Estimation From Accurate Dense Surface Point Estimates

We propose DLTPose, a novel method for 6DoF object pose estimation from RGBD images that combines the accuracy of sparse keypoint methods with the robustness of dense pixel-wise predictions. DLTPose predicts per-pixel radial distances to a set of minimally four keypoints, which are then fed into our novel Direct Linear Transform (DLT) formulation to produce accurate 3D object frame surface estimates, leading to better 6DoF pose estimation. Additionally, we introduce a novel symmetry-aware keypoint ordering approach, designed to handle object symmetries that otherwise cause inconsistencies in keypoint assignments. Previous keypoint-based methods relied on fixed keypoint orderings, which failed to account for the multiple valid configurations exhibited by symmetric objects, which our ordering approach exploits to enhance the model's ability to learn stable keypoint representations. Extensive experiments on the benchmark LINEMOD, Occlusion LINEMOD and YCB-Video datasets show that DLTPose outperforms existing methods, especially for symmetric and occluded objects. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DLTPose_/ .
Dec 3, 2024

Cascaded Multi-Scale Attention for Enhanced Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Interaction with Low-Resolution Images

In real-world applications of image recognition tasks, such as human pose estimation, cameras often capture objects, like human bodies, at low resolutions. This scenario poses a challenge in extracting and leveraging multi-scale features, which is often essential for precise inference. To address this challenge, we propose a new attention mechanism, named cascaded multi-scale attention (CMSA), tailored for use in CNN-ViT hybrid architectures, to handle low-resolution inputs effectively. The design of CMSA enables the extraction and seamless integration of features across various scales without necessitating the downsampling of the input image or feature maps. This is achieved through a novel combination of grouped multi-head self-attention mechanisms with window-based local attention and cascaded fusion of multi-scale features over different scales. This architecture allows for the effective handling of features across different scales, enhancing the model's ability to perform tasks such as human pose estimation, head pose estimation, and more with low-resolution images. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in these areas with fewer parameters, showcasing its potential for broad application in real-world scenarios where capturing high-resolution images is not feasible. Code is available at https://github.com/xyongLu/CMSA.
Mar 27, 2024

Accurate and Efficient Object Pose Estimation via the Aggregation of Diffusion Features

Estimating the pose of objects from images is a crucial task of 3D scene understanding, and recent approaches have shown promising results on very large benchmarks. However, these methods experience a significant performance drop when dealing with unseen objects. To address this problem, we have an in-depth analysis on the features of diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion, which hold substantial potential for modeling unseen objects. Based on this analysis, we then innovatively introduce these diffusion features for object pose estimation. To verify the efficacy of diffusion features for object pose estimation, we propose three distinct architectures (vanilla, nonlinear, and context-aware weight aggregations) that capture and aggregate diffusion features for comparative analysis. To achieve an efficient feature aggregation, we propose a confidence adaptive aggregation network that automatically selects the discriminative features rather than uses all the features, achieving a better speed-and-accuracy trade-off. In particular, our confidence adaptive aggregation network achieves higher accuracy than the previous best arts on unseen objects: 97.7% vs. 93.5% on Unseen LM, 85.5% vs. 76.3% on Unseen O-LM, showing the strong generalizability of our method. On the large-scale BOP benchmark, our method also provides measurable gains, with an average recall of 58.3 compared to 57.9 previously. In addition, CAA reduces computational cost by 1.3-1.5 compared to the CWA variant while maintaining comparable accuracy. Furthermore, CAA reaches real-time performance, achieving over 68 FPS and offering a substantially improved accuracy-efficiency trade-off.