Next Viewpoint Recommendation by Pose Ambiguity Minimization for Accurate Object Pose Estimation

Abstract

3D object pose estimation by using a depth sensor is one of the important tasks in activities by robots. To reduce the pose ambiguity of an estimated object pose, several methods for multiple viewpoint pose estimation have been proposed. However, these methods need to select the viewpoints carefully to obtain better results. If the pose of the target object is ambiguous from the current observation, we could not decide where we should move the sensor to set as the next viewpoint. In this paper, we propose a best next viewpoint recommendation method by minimizing the pose ambiguity of the object by making use of the current pose estimation result as a latent variable. We evaluated viewpoints recommended by the proposed method and confirmed that it helps us to gain better pose estimation results than several comparative methods on a synthetic dataset.