Object-centric models inspired by DETR have become the dominant paradigm for open-vocabulary video instance segmentation (OV-VIS). While recent efforts have reduced the computational cost of pixel decoding, textual modality fusion, and object decoding to make these architectures more suitable for mobile devices, real-time on-device inference at high frame rates remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce SegFS, a dual-stream fast-slow framework that significantly improves efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. On sparse keyframes, an open-vocabulary object-based model predicts instance-level representations. These representations are then projected back into the backbone feature space to condition a lightweight fast network, which efficiently relocalizes and segments the instances in subsequent frames. By shifting instance propagation from object decoding to feature-space conditioning, our approach decouples multimodal semantic understanding from dense mask prediction and enables efficient temporal propagation. The proposed fast branch achieves up to 14x lower latency than the mobile-oriented MOBIUS model, while maintaining competitive segmentation performance on standard OV-VIS benchmarks.

Comparing object orientations and positions across different instances requires their poses to be expressed in a shared canonical frame. Establishing such frames has traditionally required manual annotation, creating a scaling bottleneck that limits category and instance diversity. We show that a shared canonical frame can instead emerge from self-supervised training on object-centric videos captured in the wild, using only noisy camera poses from Structure-from-Motion. Our key idea is to route all training sequences through a shared geometric bottleneck: a coarse canonical mesh that carries no category-specific detail. By learning dense correspondences from image pixels to this mesh, and estimating per-sequence alignments from noisy SfM geometry, a common canonical frame emerges from multi-view consistency and the semantic priors of the feature extractor, without any canonical pose labels or category conditioning. Trained in a self-supervised manner on 160,000 in-the-wild object videos, our method achieves competitive accuracy on category-level pose estimation benchmarks compared to methods that rely on canonical pose supervision. The code and checkpoint is available on https://github.com/Fischer-Tom/Emergent-Canonical-Frame/.

Tracking-Any-Point (TAP) models aim to track any point through a video which is a crucial task in AR/XR and robotics applications. The recently introduced TAPNext approach proposes an end-to-end, recurrent transformer architecture to track points frame-by-frame in a purely online fashion – demonstrating competitive performance at minimal latency. However, we show that TAPNext struggles with longer video sequences and also frequently fails to re-detect query points that reappear after being occluded or leaving the frame. In this work, we present TAPNext++, a model that tracks points in sequences that are orders of magnitude longer while preserving the low memory and compute footprint of the architecture. We train the recurrent video transformer using several data-driven solutions, including training on long 1024-frame sequences enabled by sequence parallelism techniques. We highlight that re-detection performance is a blind spot in the current literature and introduce a new metric, Re-Detection Average Jaccard (AJ_RD), to explicitly evaluate tracking on re-appearing points. To improve re-detection of points, we introduce tailored geometric augmentations, such as periodic roll that simulates point re-entries, and supervising occluded points. We demonstrate that recurrent transformers can be substantially improved for point tracking and set a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks. Model and code can be found at https://tap-next-plus-plus.github.io.

While current 6D pose estimation benchmarks have reached near-saturation on household objects, they often fail to capture the stochastic and optical complexities of industrial environments. We introduce XYZ-IBD, a high-precision benchmark for object detection and 6D pose estimation specifically designed for industrial bin-picking. XYZ-IBD addresses the domain gap by providing 75 multi-view real-world scenes containing approximately 273k annotated instances of metallic, symmetrical, and specular objects. Unlike existing datasets, our benchmark features high-density stochastic stacking and multi-instance ambiguity, reflecting authentic robotic manipulation challenges. We employ a rigorous multi-stage and semi-automatic annotation pipeline, ensuring sub-millimeter annotation accuracy. The annotations are validated through our designed error quantification scheme, securing the reliability of the annotation quality. In addition to real-world evaluation data, we provide a large-scale complementary synthetic training set that is rendered under a realistic bin-picking simulation. Benchmarking state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for 2D detection and 6D pose estimation reveals a significant performance degradation compared to standard household benchmarks, highlighting the unsolved challenges of industrial vision. XYZ-IBD establishes a new frontier for robust pose estimation in complex, high-occlusion, and reflective scenarios. The dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://xyz-ibd.github.io.

We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2024, the sixth in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in 6D object pose estimation and related tasks. In 2024, our goal was to transition BOP from lab-like setups to real-world scenarios. First, we introduced new model-free tasks, where no 3D object models are available and methods need to onboard objects just from provided reference videos. Second, we defined a new, more practical 6D object detection task where identities of objects visible in a test image are not provided as input. Third, we introduced new BOP-H3 datasets recorded with high-resolution sensors and AR/VR headsets, closely resembling real-world scenarios. BOP-H3 include 3D models and onboarding videos to support both model-based and model-free tasks. Participants competed on seven challenge tracks, each defined by a task, object onboarding setup, and dataset group. Notably, the best 2024 method for model-based 6D localization of unseen objects (FreeZeV2.1) achieves 22 accuracy on BOP-Classic-Core than the best 2023 method (GenFlow), and is only 4 significantly slower (24.9 vs 2.7s per image). A more practical 2024 method for this task is Co-op which takes only 0.8s per image and is 25X faster and 13 more accurate than GenFlow. Methods have a similar ranking on 6D detection as on 6D localization but higher run time. On model-based 2D detection of unseen objects, the best 2024 method (MUSE) achieves 21 to the best 2023 method (CNOS). However, the 2D detection accuracy for unseen objects is still noticealy (-53 (GDet2023). The online evaluation system stays open and is available at http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99 as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75 categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

In this work, we present a novel dense-correspondence method for 6DoF object pose estimation from a single RGB-D image. While many existing data-driven methods achieve impressive performance, they tend to be time-consuming due to their reliance on rendering-based refinement approaches. To circumvent this limitation, we present HiPose, which establishes 3D-3D correspondences in a coarse-to-fine manner with a hierarchical binary surface encoding. Unlike previous dense-correspondence methods, we estimate the correspondence surface by employing point-to-surface matching and iteratively constricting the surface until it becomes a correspondence point while gradually removing outliers. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks LM-O, YCB-V, and T-Less demonstrate that our method surpasses all refinement-free methods and is even on par with expensive refinement-based approaches. Crucially, our approach is computationally efficient and enables real-time critical applications with high accuracy requirements.

We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2023, the fifth in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in model-based 6D object pose estimation from an RGB/RGB-D image and related tasks. Besides the three tasks from 2022 (2D detection, 2D segmentation, and 6D localization of objects seen during training), the 2023 challenge introduced new variants of these tasks focused on objects unseen during training. In the new tasks, methods were required to learn new objects during a short onboarding stage (max 5 minutes, 1 GPU) from provided 3D object models. The best 2023 method for 6D localization of unseen objects (GenFlow) notably reached the accuracy of the best 2020 method for seen objects (CosyPose), although being noticeably slower. The best 2023 method for seen objects (GPose) achieved a moderate accuracy improvement but a significant 43% run time improvement compared to the best 2022 counterpart (GDRNPP). Since 2017, the accuracy of 6D localization of seen objects has improved by more than 50% (from 56.9 to 85.6 ARC). The online evaluation system stays open and is available at: bop.felk.cvut.cz.

We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2022, the fourth in a series of public competitions organized with the goal to capture the status quo in the field of 6D object pose estimation from an RGB/RGB-D image. In 2022, we witnessed another significant improvement in the pose estimation accuracy – the state of the art, which was 56.9 AR C in 2019 (Vidal et al.) and 69.8 AR C in 2020 (CosyPose), moved to new heights of 83.7 AR C (GDRNPP). Out of 49 pose estimation methods evaluated since 2019, the top 18 are from 2022. Methods based on point pair features, which were introduced in 2010 and achieved competitive results even in 2020, are now clearly outperformed by deep learning methods. The synthetic-to-real domain gap was again significantly reduced, with 82.7 AR C achieved by GDRNPP trained only on synthetic images from BlenderProc. The fastest variant of GDRNPP reached 80.5 AR C with an average time per image of 0.23s. Since most of the recent methods for 6D object pose estimation begin by detecting/segmenting objects, we also started evaluating 2D object detection and segmentation performance based on the COCO metrics. Compared to the Mask R-CNN results from CosyPose in 2020, detection improved from 60.3 to 77.3 AP C and segmentation from 40.5 to 58.7 AP C . The online evaluation system stays open and is available at: bop.felk.cvut.cz.

We present a novel technique to estimate the 6D pose of objects from single images where the 3D geometry of the object is only given approximately and not as a precise 3D model. To achieve this, we employ a dense 2D-to-3D correspondence predictor that regresses 3D model coordinates for every pixel. In addition to the 3D coordinates, our model also estimates the pixel-wise coordinate error to discard correspondences that are likely wrong. This allows us to generate multiple 6D pose hypotheses of the object, which we then refine iteratively using a highly efficient region-based approach. We also introduce a novel pixel-wise posterior formulation by which we can estimate the probability for each hypothesis and select the most likely one. As we show in experiments, our approach is capable of dealing with extreme visual conditions including overexposure, high contrast, or low signal-to-noise ratio. This makes it a powerful technique for the particularly challenging task of estimating the pose of tumbling satellites for in-orbit robotic applications. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SPEED+ dataset and has won the SPEC2021 post-mortem competition. Code, trained models, and the used satellite model will be made publicly available.

Kinematic structures are very common in the real world. They range from simple articulated objects to complex mechanical systems. However, despite their relevance, most model-based 3D tracking methods only consider rigid objects. To overcome this limitation, we propose a flexible framework that allows the extension of existing 6DoF algorithms to kinematic structures. Our approach focuses on methods that employ Newton-like optimization techniques, which are widely used in object tracking. The framework considers both tree-like and closed kinematic structures and allows a flexible configuration of joints and constraints. To project equations from individual rigid bodies to a multi-body system, Jacobians are used. For closed kinematic chains, a novel formulation that features Lagrange multipliers is developed. In a detailed mathematical proof, we show that our constraint formulation leads to an exact kinematic solution and converges in a single iteration. Based on the proposed framework, we extend ICG, which is a state-of-the-art rigid object tracking algorithm, to multi-body tracking. For the evaluation, we create a highly-realistic synthetic dataset that features a large number of sequences and various robots. Based on this dataset, we conduct a wide variety of experiments that demonstrate the excellent performance of the developed framework and our multi-body tracker.

Tracking objects in 3D space and predicting their 6DoF pose is an essential task in computer vision. State-of-the-art approaches often rely on object texture to tackle this problem. However, while they achieve impressive results, many objects do not contain sufficient texture, violating the main underlying assumption. In the following, we thus propose ICG, a novel probabilistic tracker that fuses region and depth information and only requires the object geometry. Our method deploys correspondence lines and points to iteratively refine the pose. We also implement robust occlusion handling to improve performance in real-world settings. Experiments on the YCB-Video, OPT, and Choi datasets demonstrate that, even for textured objects, our approach outperforms the current state of the art with respect to accuracy and robustness. At the same time, ICG shows fast convergence and outstanding efficiency, requiring only 1.3 ms per frame on a single CPU core. Finally, we analyze the influence of individual components and discuss our performance compared to deep learning-based methods. The source code of our tracker is publicly available11https://github.com/DLR-RM/3DObjectTracking.

Although instance-aware perception is a key prerequisite for many autonomous robotic applications, most of the methods only partially solve the problem by focusing solely on known object categories. However, for robots interacting in dynamic and cluttered environments, this is not realistic and severely limits the range of potential applications. Therefore, we propose a novel object instance segmentation approach that does not require any semantic or geometric information of the objects beforehand. In contrast to existing works, we do not explicitly use depth data as input, but rely on the insight that slight viewpoint changes, which for example are provided by stereo image pairs, are often sufficient to determine object boundaries and thus to segment objects. Focusing on the versatility of stereo sensors, we employ a transformer-based architecture that maps directly from the pair of input images to the object instances. This has the major advantage that instead of a noisy, and potentially incomplete depth map as an input, on which the segmentation is computed, we use the original image pair to infer the object instances and a dense depth map. In experiments in several different application domains, we show that our Instance Stereo Transformer (INSTR) algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art methods that are based on depth maps. Training code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/DLR-RM/instr.

This paper presents the evaluation methodology, datasets, and results of the BOP Challenge 2020, the third in a series of public competitions organized with the goal to capture the status quo in the field of 6D object pose estimation from an RGB-D image. In 2020, to reduce the domain gap between synthetic training and real test RGB images, the participants were provided 350K photorealistic training images generated by BlenderProc4BOP, a new open-source and light-weight physically-based renderer (PBR) and procedural data generator. Methods based on deep neural networks have finally caught up with methods based on point pair features, which were dominating previous editions of the challenge. Although the top-performing methods rely on RGB-D image channels, strong results were achieved when only RGB channels were used at both training and test time - out of the 26 evaluated methods, the third method was trained on RGB channels of PBR and real images, while the fifth on RGB channels of PBR images only. Strong data augmentation was identified as a key component of the top-performing CosyPose method, and the photorealism of PBR images was demonstrated effective despite the augmentation. The online evaluation system stays open and is available on the project website: bop.felk.cvut.cz.

We present a novel framework for self-supervised grasped object segmentation with a robotic manipulator. Our method successively learns an agnostic foreground segmentation followed by a distinction between manipulator and object solely by observing the motion between consecutive RGB frames. In contrast to previous approaches, we propose a single, end-to-end trainable architecture which jointly incorporates motion cues and semantic knowledge. Furthermore, while the motion of the manipulator and the object are substantial cues for our algorithm, we present means to robustly deal with distraction objects moving in the background, as well as with completely static scenes. Our method neither depends on any visual registration of a kinematic robot or 3D object models, nor on precise hand-eye calibration or any additional sensor data. By extensive experimental evaluation we demonstrate the superiority of our framework and provide detailed insights on its capability of dealing with the aforementioned extreme cases of motion. We also show that training a semantic segmentation network with the automatically labeled data achieves results on par with manually annotated training data. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/DLR-RM/DistinctNet.

As the complexity and operation distance of space missions rises, the demand of highly autonomous rovers increases as well. An aspect of autonomous rovers that has been specifically attracting much attention from the space community is semi-autonomous sampling from celestrial bodies. Detecting possible samples is important for their extraction, which is challenging due to the unstructured and unknown enviroment, and the lack of suitable datasets. This work addresses the task of sample collection in an unknown and unstructured environment by presenting a module for visual stone segmentation. Due to the limited training data for such scenarios, we apply a photo-realistic simulator to optimize an unknown instance segmentation network. We evaluate various manners of fine-tuning and show the positive effect of training on data highly related to the test data.

Grasping unseen objects in unconstrained, cluttered environments is an essential skill for autonomous robotic manipulation. Despite recent progress in full 6-DoF grasp learning, existing approaches often consist of complex sequential pipelines that possess several potential failure points and run-times unsuitable for closed-loop grasping. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end network that efficiently generates a distribution of 6-DoF parallel-jaw grasps directly from a depth recording of a scene. Our novel grasp representation treats 3D points of the recorded point cloud as potential grasp contacts. By rooting the full 6-DoF grasp pose and width in the observed point cloud, we can reduce the dimensionality of our grasp representation to 4-DoF which greatly facilitates the learning process. Our class-agnostic approach is trained on 17 million simulated grasps and generalizes well to real world sensor data. In a robotic grasping study of unseen objects in structured clutter we achieve over 90% success rate, cutting the failure rate in half compared to a recent state-of-the-art method. Video of the real world experiments and code are available at https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-03_Contact-GraspNet%3A--Efficient.

We present a perception system for mobile manipulation tasks. The primary design goal of the proposed system is to minimize human interaction during system setup which is achieved by several means, such as automatic training data generation, the use of simulated training data, and 3D model based geometric matching. We employ a state-of-the art deep-learning based bounding box detector for rough localization of objects and a Point Pair Feature based matching algorithm for 6DoF pose estimation. The proposed approach shows promising results on our recently published dataset for industrial object detection and pose estimation. Furthermore, the system’s performance during four days of live operation at the Automatica 2018 trade fair is analyzed and failure cases are presented and discussed.

We introduce a scalable approach for object pose estimation trained on simulated RGB views of multiple 3D models together. We learn an encoding of object views that does not only describe an implicit orientation of all objects seen during training, but can also relate views of untrained objects. Our single-encoder-multi-decoder network is trained using a technique we denote "multi-path learning": While the encoder is shared by all objects, each decoder only reconstructs views of a single object. Consequently, views of different instances do not have to be separated in the latent space and can share common features. The resulting encoder generalizes well from synthetic to real data and across various instances, categories, model types and datasets. We systematically investigate the learned encodings, their generalization, and iterative refinement strategies on the ModelNet40 and T-LESS dataset. Despite training jointly on multiple objects, our 6D Object Detection pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results on T-LESS at much lower runtimes than competing approaches.