Polarimetric Pose Prediction

Light has many properties that can be passively measured by vision sensors. Colour-band separated wavelength and intensity are arguably the most commonly used ones for monocular 6D object pose estimation. This paper explores how complementary polarisation information, i.e. the orientation of light wave oscillations, can influence the accuracy of pose predictions. A hybrid model that leverages physical priors jointly with a data-driven learning strategy is designed and carefully tested on objects with different amount of photometric complexity. Our design not only significantly improves the pose accuracy in relation to photometric state-of-the-art approaches, but also enables object pose estimation for highly reflective and transparent objects.