Viewpoints and Keypoints

We characterize the problem of pose estimation for rigid objects in terms of determining viewpoint to explain coarse pose and keypoint prediction to capture the finer details. We address both these tasks in two different settings - the constrained setting with known bounding boxes and the more challenging detection setting where the aim is to simultaneously detect and correctly estimate pose of objects. We present Convolutional Neural Network based architectures for these and demonstrate that leveraging viewpoint estimates can substantially improve local appearance based keypoint predictions. In addition to achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art in the above tasks, we analyze the error modes and effect of object characteristics on performance to guide future efforts towards this goal.