NeRF-Feat: 6D Object Pose Estimation using Feature Rendering
This addresses pose estimation for robotics and AR by enabling training without complex setups, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NeRF and CNN methods.
The paper tackles 6D object pose estimation from weakly labeled data without a known CAD model by using NeRF to learn implicit shape and view-invariant features with a CNN, achieving benchmark accuracy on LM, LM-Occlusion, and T-Less datasets.
Object Pose Estimation is a crucial component in robotic grasping and augmented reality. Learning based approaches typically require training data from a highly accurate CAD model or labeled training data acquired using a complex setup. We address this by learning to estimate pose from weakly labeled data without a known CAD model. We propose to use a NeRF to learn object shape implicitly which is later used to learn view-invariant features in conjunction with CNN using a contrastive loss. While NeRF helps in learning features that are view-consistent, CNN ensures that the learned features respect symmetry. During inference, CNN is used to predict view-invariant features which can be used to establish correspondences with the implicit 3d model in NeRF. The correspondences are then used to estimate the pose in the reference frame of NeRF. Our approach can also handle symmetric objects unlike other approaches using a similar training setup. Specifically, we learn viewpoint invariant, discriminative features using NeRF which are later used for pose estimation. We evaluated our approach on LM, LM-Occlusion, and T-Less dataset and achieved benchmark accuracy despite using weakly labeled data.