We present DeSOPE, a large-scale dataset designed for Deformed Six-DoF Object Pose Estimation. Most existing 6D object pose approaches assume rigid or articulated objects, leaving deformed daily objects largely unexplored. This gap limits the realism and robustness of current pose estimation methods, which often fail when objects deviate from their canonical shapes due to wear, collision, or deformation. To address this issue, we present DeSOPE, a large-scale real-world dataset specifically designed for deformed object pose estimation. DeSOPE contains two major components: (1) a collection of high-fidelity 3D scans of 26 common object categories, each captured in one canonical and three deformed states using a non-rigid alignment framework; and (2) a real-scene RGB-D dataset comprising 133K frames and 665K pose annotations across 104 deformed instances, recorded in both static and dynamic scenarios. The varying degrees of deformation introduce substantial geometric and textural changes, presenting new challenges for existing methods. We benchmark several state-of-the-art algorithms on DeSOPE and demonstrate significant performance degradation as deformation increases, highlighting the limitations of current pose estimators. As the first large-scale dataset designed for systematic study of deformed object pose estimation, DeSOPE lays the groundwork for developing 6D pose estimators capable of handling real-world deformation and variability.

We present DeSOPE, a large-scale dataset for 6DoF deformed objects. Most 6D object pose methods assume rigid or articulated objects, an assumption that fails in practice as objects deviate from their canonical shapes due to wear, impact, or deformation. To model this, we introduce the DeSOPE dataset, which features high-fidelity 3D scans of 26 common object categories, each captured in one canonical state and three deformed configurations, with accurate 3D registration to the canonical mesh. Additionally, it features an RGB-D dataset with 133K frames across diverse scenarios and 665K pose annotations produced via a semi-automatic pipeline. We begin by annotating 2D masks for each instance, then compute initial poses using an object pose method, refine them through an object-level SLAM system, and finally perform manual verification to produce the final annotations. We evaluate several object pose methods and find that performance drops sharply with increasing deformation, suggesting that robust handling of such deformations is critical for practical applications. The project page and dataset are available at https://desope-6d.github.io/}{https://desope-6d.github.io/.

We introduce SCFlow2, a plug-and-play refinement framework for 6D object pose estimation. Most recent 6D object pose methods rely on refinement to get accurate results. However, most existing refinement methods either suffer from noises in establishing correspondences, or rely on retraining for novel objects. SCFlow2 is based on the SCFlow model designed for refinement with shape constraint, but formulates the additional depth as a regularization in the iteration via 3D scene flow for RGBD frames. The key design of SCFlow2 is an introduction of geometry constraints into the training of recurrent matching network, by combining the rigid-motion embeddings in 3D scene flow and 3D shape prior of the target. We train SCFlow2 on a combination of dataset Objaverse, GSO and ShapeNet, and evaluate on BOP datasets with novel objects. After using our method as a post-processing, most state-of-the-art methods produce significantly better results, without any retraining or fine-tuning. The source code is available at https://scflow2.github.io.

We propose an approach for reconstructing free-moving object from a monocular RGB video. Most existing methods either assume scene prior, hand pose prior, object category pose prior, or rely on local optimization with multiple sequence segments. We propose a method that allows free interaction with the object in front of a moving camera without relying on any prior, and optimizes the sequence globally without any segments. We progressively optimize the object shape and pose simultaneously based on an implicit neural representation. A key aspect of our method is a virtual camera system that reduces the search space of the optimization significantly. We evaluate our method on the standard HO3D dataset and a collection of egocentric RGB sequences captured with a head-mounted device. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms most methods significantly, and is on par with recent techniques that assume prior information.

Most self-supervised 6D object pose estimation methods can only work with additional depth information or rely on the accurate annotation of 2D segmentation masks, limiting their application range. In this paper, we propose a 6D object pose estimation method that can be trained with pure RGB images without any auxiliary information. We first obtain a rough pose initialization from networks trained on synthetic images rendered from the target's 3D mesh. Then, we introduce a refinement strategy leveraging the geometry constraint in synthetic-to-real image pairs from multiple different views. We formulate this geometry constraint as pixel-level flow consistency between the training images with dynamically generated pseudo labels. We evaluate our method on three challenging datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised methods significantly, with neither 2D annotations nor additional depth images.

This work presents a novel approach for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. The key element of this approach is our contrastive learning module that enforces the segmentation network to yield similar pixel-level feature representations for same-class samples across the whole dataset. To achieve this, we maintain a memory bank which is continuously updated with relevant and high-quality feature vectors from labeled data. In an end-to-end training, the features from both labeled and unlabeled data are optimized to be similar to same-class samples from the memory bank. Our approach not only outperforms the current state-of-the-art for semi-supervised semantic segmentation but also for semi-supervised domain adaptation on well-known public benchmarks, with larger improvements on the most challenging scenarios, i.e., less available labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/Shathe/SemiSeg-Contrastive

We introduce a novel approach to unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation. Unlike many earlier methods that rely on adversarial learning for feature alignment, we leverage contrastive learning to bridge the domain gap by aligning the features of structurally similar label patches across domains. As a result, the networks are easier to train and deliver better performance. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised methods on two challenging domain adaptive segmentation tasks, particularly with a small number of target domain annotations. It can also be naturally extended to weakly-supervised domain adaptation, where only a minor drop in accuracy can save up to 75% of annotation cost.

In this paper we present a novel method to increase the spatial resolution of depth images. We combine a deep fully convolutional network with a non-local variational method in a deep primal-dual network. The joint network computes a noise-free, high-resolution estimate from a noisy, low-resolution input depth map. Additionally, a high-resolution intensity image is used to guide the reconstruction in the network. By unrolling the optimization steps of a first-order primal-dual algorithm and formulating it as a network, we can train our joint method end-to-end. This not only enables us to learn the weights of the fully convolutional network, but also to optimize all parameters of the variational method and its optimization procedure. The training of such a deep network requires a large dataset for supervision. Therefore, we generate high-quality depth maps and corresponding color images with a physically based renderer. In an exhaustive evaluation we show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks.

This paper presents an approach to data fusion from multiple depth sensors with different principles of range measurements. This concept is motivated by the observation that depth sensors exploiting different range measurement techniques have also distinct characteristics of the uncertainty and artifacts in the obtained depth images. Thus, fusing the information from two or more measurement channels allows us to mutually compensate for some of the unwanted effects. The target application for our combined sensor is Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). We demonstrated that fusing depth data from two sources in the convex optimization framework yields better results in feature-based 3-D SLAM, than the use of individual sensors for this task. The experimental part is based on data registered with a calibrated rig comprising ASUS Xtion Pro Live and MESA SwissRanger SR-4000 sensors, and ground truth trajectories obtained from a motion capture system. The results of sensor trajectory estimation are demonstrated in terms of the ATE and RPE metrics, widely adopted by the SLAM community.

We present a novel method for an automatic calibration of modern consumer Timeof-Flight (ToF) cameras. Usually, these sensors come equipped with an integrated color camera. Albeit they deliver acquisitions at high frame rates they usually suffer from incorrect calibration and low accuracy due to multiple error sources. Using information from both cameras together with a simple planar target, we will show how to accurately calibrate both color and depth camera, and tackle most error sources inherent to ToF technology in a unified calibration framework. Automatic feature detection minimizes user interaction during calibration. We utilize a Random Regression Forest to optimize the manufacturer supplied depth measurements. We show the improvements to commonly used depth calibration methods in a qualitative and quantitative evaluation on multiple scenes acquired by an accurate reference system for the application of dense 3D reconstruction.

In this paper we propose a novel method for depth image superresolution which combines recent advances in example based upsampling with variational superresolution based on a known blur kernel. Most traditional depth superresolution approaches try to use additional high resolution intensity images as guidance for superresolution. In our method we learn a dictionary of edge priors from an external database of high and low resolution examples. In a novel variational sparse coding approach this dictionary is used to infer strong edge priors. Additionally to the traditional sparse coding constraints the difference in the overlap of neighboring edge patches is minimized in our optimization. These edge priors are used in a novel variational superresolution as anisotropic guidance of the higher order regularization. Both the sparse coding and the variational superresolution of the depth are solved based on a primal-dual formulation. In an exhaustive numerical and visual evaluation we show that our method clearly outperforms existing approaches on multiple real and synthetic datasets.

We present in this paper a framework for articulated hand pose estimation and evaluation. Within this framework we implemented recently published methods for hand segmentation and inference of hand postures. We further propose a new approach for the segmentation and extend existing convolutional network based inference methods. Additionally, we created a new dataset that consists of a synthetically generated training set and accurately annotated test sequences captured with two different consumer depth cameras. The evaluation shows that we can improve with our methods the state-of-the-art. To foster further research, we will make all sources and the complete dataset used in this work publicly available.

In this paper we present a novel method to accurately estimate the dense 3D motion field, known as scene flow, from depth and intensity acquisitions. The method is formulated as a convex energy optimization, where the motion warping of each scene point is estimated through a projection and back-projection directly in 3D space. We utilize higher order regularization which is weighted and directed according to the input data by an anisotropic diffusion tensor. Our formulation enables the calculation of a dense flow field which does not penalize smooth and non-rigid movements while aligning motion boundaries with strong depth boundaries. An efficient parallelization of the numerical algorithm leads to runtimes in the order of 1s and therefore enables the method to be used in a variety of applications. We show that this novel scene flow calculation outperforms existing approaches in terms of speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate applications such as camera pose estimation and depth image super resolution, which are enabled by the high accuracy of the proposed method. We show these applications using modern depth sensors such as Microsoft Kinect or the PMD Nano Time-of-Flight sensor.

We present a novel method for dense variational scene flow estimation based a multiscale Ternary Census Transform in combination with a patchwise Closest Points depth data term. On the one hand, the Ternary Census Transform in the intensity data term is capable of handling illumination changes, low texture and noise. On the other hand, the patchwise Closest Points search in the depth data term increases the robustness in low structured regions. Further, we utilize higher order regularization which is weighted and directed according to the input data by an anisotropic diffusion tensor. This allows to calculate a dense and accurate flow field which supports smooth as well as non-rigid movements while preserving flow boundaries. The numerical algorithm is solved based on a primal-dual formulation and is efficiently parallelized to run at high frame rates. In an extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation we show that this novel method for scene flow calculation outperforms existing approaches. The method is applicable to any sensor delivering dense depth and intensity data such as Microsoft Kinect or Intel Gesture Camera.

We present Hough Networks (HNs), a novel method that combines the idea of Hough Forests (HFs) [12] with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) [18]. Similar to HFs we perform a simultaneous classification and regression on densely extracted image patches. But instead of a Random Forest (RF) we utilize a CNN which is able to learn higherorder feature representations and does not rely on any handcrafted features. Applying a CNN on a patch level has the advantage of reasoning about more image details and additionally allows to segment the image into foreground and background. Furthermore, the structure of a CNN supports efficient inference of patches extracted from a regular grid. We evaluate HNs on two computer vision tasks: head pose estimation and facial feature localization. Our method achieves at least state-of-the-art performance without sacrificing versatility which allows extension to many other applications.

We present a novel fusion method that combines complementary 3D and 2D imaging techniques. Consider a Time-of-Flight sensor that acquires a dense depth map on a wide depth range but with a comparably small resolution. Complementary, a stereo sensor generates a disparity map in high resolution but with occlusions and outliers. In our method, we fuse depth data, and optionally also intensity data using a primal-dual optimization, with an energy functional that is designed to compensate for missing parts, filter strong outliers and reduce the acquisition noise. The numerical algorithm is efficiently implemented on a GPU to achieve a processing speed of 10 to 15 frames per second. Experiments on synthetic, real and benchmark datasets show that the results are superior compared to each sensor alone and to competing optimization techniques. In a practical example, we are able to fuse a Kinect triangulation sensor and a small size Time-of-Flight camera to create a gaming sensor with superior resolution, acquisition range and accuracy.