Accurate 6D object pose estimation and refinement in cluttered scenes

Estimating the 6D pose of objects is an essential part of a robot’s ability to perceive their environment. This paper proposes a method for detecting a known object and estimating its 6D pose from a single RGB image. Unlike most of the state-of-the-art methods that deploy PnP algorithms for estimating 6D pose, the method here can output the 6D pose in one step. In order to obtain estimation accuracy that is comparable to RGB-D based methods, an efficient refinement algorithm, called contour alignment (CA), is presented; this can increase the predicted 6D pose accuracy significantly. We evaluate the new method in two widely used benchmarks, LINEMOD for single object pose estimation and Occlusion-LINEMOD for multiple objects pose estimation. The experiments show that the proposed method surpasses other state-of-the-art prediction approaches.