PicoPose: Progressive Pixel-to-Pixel Correspondence Learning for Novel Object Pose Estimation

Novel object pose estimation from RGB images presents a significant challenge for zero-shot generalization, as it involves estimating the relative 6D transformation between an RGB observation and a CAD model of an object that was not seen during training. In this paper, we introduce PicoPose, a novel framework designed to tackle this task using a three-stage pixel-to-pixel correspondence learning process. Firstly, PicoPose matches features from the RGB observation with those from rendered object templates, identifying the best-matched template and establishing coarse correspondences. Secondly, PicoPose smooths the correspondences by globally regressing a 2D affine transformation, including in-plane rotation, scale, and 2D translation, from the coarse correspondence map. Thirdly, PicoPose applies the affine transformation to the feature map of the best-matched template and learns correspondence offsets within local regions to achieve fine-grained correspondences. By progressively refining the correspondences, PicoPose significantly improves the accuracy of object poses computed via PnP/RANSAC. PicoPose achieves state-of-the-art performance on the seven core datasets of the BOP benchmark, demonstrating exceptional generalization to novel objects represented by CAD models or object reference images. Code and models are available at https://github.com/foollh/PicoPose.