Symmetry-Aware 6D Object Pose Estimation via Multitask Learning

Although 6D object pose estimation has been intensively explored in the past decades, the performance is still not fully satisfactory, especially when it comes to symmetric objects. In this paper, we study the problem of 6D object pose estimation by leveraging the information of object symmetry. To this end, a network is proposed that predicts 6D object pose and object reflectional symmetry as well as the key points simultaneously via a multitask learning scheme. Consequently, the pose estimation is aware of and regulated by the symmetry axis and the key points of the to-be-estimated objects. Moreover, we devise an optimization function to refine the predicted 6D object pose by considering the predicted symmetry. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed symmetry-aware approach outperforms the existing methods in terms of predicting 6D pose estimation of symmetric objects.