Res6D: Projective Residual Regression for 6D Pose Estimation

In RGB-D based 6D pose estimation, direct regression approaches can directly predict the 3D rotation and translation from RGB-D data, allowing for quick deployment and efficient inference. However, directly regressing the absolute translation of the pose suffers from diverse object translation distribution between the training and testing datasets, which is usually caused by the diversity of pose distribution of objects in 3D physical space. To this end, we generalize the pin-hole camera projection model to a residual-based projection model and propose the projective residual regression (Res6D) mechanism. Given a reference point for each object in an RGB-D image, Res6D not only reduces the distribution gap and shrinks the regression target to a small range by regressing the residual between the target and the reference point, but also aligns its output residual and its input to follow the projection equation between the 2D plane and 3D space. By plugging Res6D into the latest direct regression methods, we achieve state-of-the-art overall results on datasets including Occlusion LineMOD (ADD(S): 79.7%), LineMOD (ADD(S): 99.5%), and YCB-Video datasets (AUC of ADD(S): 95.4%).