A Multitask Learning Convolutional Neural Network for Object Pose Estimation xe2x8bx86 Estimating 6D poses of objects from RGB images is very crucial for robots to interact with the surrounding environment and to cooperate with humans. It is a challenging problem due to the various shapes of objects, the occlusions among objects, as well as the complexity of the scene. In this study, we present a new multitask convolutional neural network for 6D object pose estimation, which also learns the object region in the image to further improve the estimation result. A weighted loss computed from the training samples is adopted to guarantee that the components of the estimated pose are equally accurate. Additionally, we sythesize new virtual data based on the existing training data so as to overcome the possible adverse situation caused by insufficiency of training data. Experiments on the YCBvideo dataset are undertaken to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Adaptive Loss Balancing for Multitask Learning of Object Instance Recognition and 3D Pose Estimation Object instance recognition and 3D pose estimation are important elements in robot vision technology. Stateoftheart methods improve the accuracy of both instance recognition and pose estimation using multitask learning. These methods use unified balancing parameters to integrate the loss of each task, which means task difficulties are the same for all objects. However, the method we propose can adjust the balancing parameters for each object. This idea is based on the assumption that task difficulties are different for each object, since the distinctiveness of object instances and poses depends on their appearance and shape. Our method sequentially estimates task difficulties for CNN based on the amount of loss change and calculates balancing parameters for each object. Our experiments show that our method improves the accuracy of both object instance recognition and pose estimation compared with stateoftheart methods using the common LineMOD dataset.