6D-Diff: A Keypoint Diffusion Framework for 6D Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Li Xu, Haoxuan Qu, Yujun Cai, Jun Liu

Estimating the 6D object pose from a single RGB image often involves noise and indeterminacy due to challenges such as occlusions and cluttered backgrounds. Meanwhile diffusion models have shown appealing performance in generating high-quality images from random noise with high indeterminacy through step-by-step denoising. Inspired by their denoising capability we propose a novel diffusion-based framework (6D-Diff) to handle the noise and indeterminacy in object pose estimation for better performance. In our framework to establish accurate 2D-3D correspondence we formulate 2D keypoints detection as a reverse diffusion (denoising) process. To facilitate such a denoising process we design a Mixture-of-Cauchy-based forward diffusion process and condition the reverse process on the object appearance features. Extensive experiments on the LM-O and YCB-V datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.