# Deep Bingham Networks: Dealing with Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.11002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Implicit-PDF: Non-Parametric Representation of Probability Distributions on the Rotation Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05965/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Rigid 3D Scene Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08945/) (2021)
- [Quantum Permutation Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07755/) (2021)
- [Projective Manifold Gradient Layer for Deep Rotation Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11657/) (2021)
- [DiffusionNOCS: Managing Symmetry and Uncertainty in Sim2Real Multi-Modal Category-level Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12647/) (2024)
- [Around the World in 80 Timesteps: A Generative Approach to Global Visual Geolocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06781/) (2024)
- [Image to Sphere: Learning Equivariant Features for Efficient Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13926/) (2023)
- [Confronting Ambiguity in 6D Object Pose Estimation via Score-Based Diffusion on SE(3)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15873/) (2023)
- [FisherMatch: Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression via Entropy-based Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15765/) (2022)
- [HR-APR: APR-agnostic Framework with Uncertainty Estimation and Hierarchical Refinement for Camera Relocalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14371/) (2024)
- [SpyroPose: SE(3) Pyramids for Object Pose Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05308/) (2023)
- [Delving into Discrete Normalizing Flows on SO(3) Manifold for Probabilistic Rotation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03937/) (2023)
- [A Probabilistic Framework for Visual Localization in Ambiguous Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02086/) (2023)
- [A Laplace-inspired Distribution on SO(3) for Probabilistic Rotation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01743/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty Quantification with Deep Ensembles for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07741/) (2024)
- [Ki-Pode: Keypoint-based Implicit Pose Distribution Estimation of Rigid Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09659/) (2022)
- [Ambiguity-Aware Multi-Object Pose Optimization for Visually-Assisted Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00960/) (2022)
- [Equivariant Single View Pose Prediction Via Induced and Restricted Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03704/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Probabilistic Modeling on SO(3) via Rotation Laplace Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10465/) (2023)
- [3D Equivariant Pose Regression via Direct Wigner-D Harmonics Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00543/) (2024)
- [SE(3)-PoseFlow: Estimating 6D Pose Distributions for Uncertainty-Aware Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01501/) (2025)
- [BOP-Distrib: Revisiting 6D Pose Estimation Benchmarks for Better Evaluation under Visual Ambiguities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17297/) (2024)
- [Active 6D Pose Estimation for Textureless Objects using Multi-View RGB Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03726/) (2025)
- [Learning Implicit Probability Distribution Functions for Symmetric Orientation Estimation from RGB Images Without Pose Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11394/) (2022)
- [RGB-D-Based Categorical Object Pose and Shape Estimation: Methods, Datasets, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08147/) (2023)
- [A Probabilistic Rotation Representation for Symmetric Shapes With an Efficiently Computable Bingham Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18947/) (2023)
- [Alignist: CAD-Informed Orientation Distribution Estimation by Fusing Shape and Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06683/) (2024)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoders for Probabilistic Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04989/) (2024)
- [Are Euler angles a useful rotation parameterisation for pose estimation with Normalizing Flows?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02277/) (2025)
- [Probabilistic Rotation Representation With an Efficiently Computable Bingham Loss Function and Its Application to Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04456/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce Deep Bingham Networks (DBN), a generic framework that can naturally handle pose-related uncertainties and ambiguities arising in almost all real life applications concerning 3D data. While existing works strive to find a single solution to the pose estimation problem, we make peace with the ambiguities causing high uncertainty around which solutions to identify as the best. Instead, we report a family of poses which capture the nature of the solution space. DBN extends the state of the art direct pose regression networks by (i) a multi-hypotheses prediction head which can yield different distribution modes; and (ii) novel loss functions that benefit from Bingham distributions on rotations. This way, DBN can work both in unambiguous cases providing uncertainty information, and in ambiguous scenes where an uncertainty per mode is desired. On a technical front, our network regresses continuous Bingham mixture models and is applicable to both 2D data such as images and to 3D data such as point clouds. We proposed new training strategies so as to avoid mode or posterior collapse during training and to improve numerical stability. Our methods are thoroughly tested on two different applications exploiting two different modalities: (i) 6D camera relocalization from images; and (ii) object pose estimation from 3D point clouds, demonstrating decent advantages over the state of the art. For the former we contributed our own dataset composed of five indoor scenes where it is unavoidable to capture images corresponding to views that are hard to uniquely identify. For the latter we achieve the top results especially for symmetric objects of ModelNet dataset.