On Evaluation of 6d Object Pose Estimation

Abstract

A pose of a rigid object has 6 degrees of freedom and its full knowledge is required in many robotic and scene understanding applications. Evaluation of 6D object pose estimates is not straightforward. Object pose may be ambiguous due to object symmetries and occlusions, i.e.  there can be multiple object poses that are indistinguishable in the given image and should be therefore treated as equivalent. The paper defines 6D object pose estimation problems, proposes an evaluation methodology and introduces three new pose error functions that deal with pose ambiguity. The new error functions are compared with functions commonly used in the literature and shown to remove certain types of non-intuitive outcomes. Evaluation tools are provided at: https://github.com/thodan/obj_pose_eval .