Query6DoF: Learning Sparse Queries as Implicit Shape Prior for Category-Level 6DoF Pose Estimation

Category-level 6DoF object pose estimation intends to estimate the rotation, translation, and size of unseen objects. Many previous works use point clouds as a pre-learned shape prior to overcome intra-category variability. The shape prior is deformed to reconstruct instances' point clouds in canonical space and to build dense 3D-3D correspondences between the observed and reconstructed point clouds. However, the pre-learned shape prior is not jointly optimized with estimation networks, and they are trained with a surrogate objective. We propose a novel 6D pose estimation network, named Query6DoF, based on a series of category-specific sparse queries that represent the prior shape. Each query represents a shape component, and these queries are learnable embeddings that can be optimized together with the estimation network according to the point cloud reconstruction loss, the normalized object coordinate loss, and the 6d pose estimation loss. Query6DoF adopts a deformation-and-matching paradigm with attention, where the queries dynamically extract features from regions of interest using the attention mechanism and then directly regress results. Furthermore, Query6DoF reduces computation overhead through the sparseness of the queries and the incorporation of a lightweight global information injection block. With the aforementioned design, Query6DoF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) pose estimation performance on the NOCS datasets. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/Query6DoF.