YOLOPose: Transformer-based Multi-Object 6D Pose Estimation using Keypoint Regression
This work addresses pose estimation for robotics, but it is incremental as it adapts Transformers to an existing task with competitive performance.
The authors tackled 6D object pose estimation for autonomous robot manipulation by proposing YOLOPose, a Transformer-based method using keypoint regression, which achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art methods and is suitable for real-time applications.
6D object pose estimation is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous robot manipulation applications. The state-of-the-art models for pose estimation are convolutional neural network (CNN)-based. Lately, Transformers, an architecture originally proposed for natural language processing, is achieving state-of-the-art results in many computer vision tasks as well. Equipped with the multi-head self-attention mechanism, Transformers enable simple single-stage end-to-end architectures for learning object detection and 6D object pose estimation jointly. In this work, we propose YOLOPose (short form for You Only Look Once Pose estimation), a Transformer-based multi-object 6D pose estimation method based on keypoint regression. In contrast to the standard heatmaps for predicting keypoints in an image, we directly regress the keypoints. Additionally, we employ a learnable orientation estimation module to predict the orientation from the keypoints. Along with a separate translation estimation module, our model is end-to-end differentiable. Our method is suitable for real-time applications and achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art methods.