A Novel Depth and Color Feature Fusion Framework for 6D Object Pose Estimation

This paper aims to solve the problem of estimating the 6D pose of an object under occlusion using RGB-D images. Most existing methods typically use the information of color and depth images separately to make predictions, which limits their performances in the presence of occlusion. Instead, we propose a pipeline to effectively fuse color and depth information and perform region-level pose estimation. Our method first uses a CNN to extract the color features, and then we obtain the fusion features by combining the color features into the point cloud. Unlike existing methods, the fusion features are in the form of point sets instead of feature maps. We further use a PointNet++-like network to process the fusion features, obtaining several region-level features. Each region-level feature can predict a pose with confidence. The pose with the highest confidence is chosen as the final output. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both the LINEMOD and Occlusion LINEMOD datasets, indicating that the proposed pipeline can obtain accurate pose estimation results and is robust to occlusion.