Generalizable Pose Estimation Using Implicit Scene Representations

Vaibhav Saxena*^, Kamal Rahimi Malekshan^, Linh Tran^, Yotto Koga^


*School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech
^Robotics Lab, Autodesk Research

Paper (presented at ICRA '23) | Code

Abstract

6-DoF pose estimation is an essential component of robotic manipulation pipelines. However, it usually suffers from a lack of generalization to new instances and object types. Most widely used methods learn to infer the object pose in a discriminative setup where the model filters useful information to infer the exact pose of the object. While such methods offer accurate poses, the model does not store enough information to generalize to new objects. In this work, we address the generalization capability of pose estimation using models that contain enough information about the object to render it in different poses. We follow the line of work that inverts neural renderers to infer the pose. We propose i-σSRN to maximize the information flowing from the input pose to the rendered scene and invert them to infer the pose given an input image. Specifically, we extend Scene Representation Networks (SRNs) by incorporating a separate network for density estimation and introduce a new way of obtaining a weighted scene representation. We investigate several ways of initial pose estimates and losses for the neural renderer. Our final evaluation shows a significant improvement in inference performance and speed compared to existing approaches.

Project Video

σSRN (scene renderer)

Scene representation model, adapted from Sitzmann et al. (2019), with a shorter gradient path useful for pose estimation.

i-σSRN (pose estimator)

Given the image of an object, we invert the neural renderer to obtain its pose estimate.

Pose Estimation demos using i-σSRN

Query image

Query image

Query image

Pose estimation using i-σSRN

Pose estimation using i-σSRN

Pose estimation using i-σSRN

Query image

Query image

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Pose estimation using i-σSRN

Pose estimation using i-σSRN

Pose estimation using i-σSRN

Poster @ICRA2023

This work was done while Vaibhav was interning at Autodesk Research during the Summer of 2022. Kamal, Linh and Yotto were full-time at Autodesk Research during that time. Please forward any questions to vsaxena33[at]gatech.edu.