# FFB6D: A Full Flow Bidirectional Fusion Network for 6D Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.02242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02242/

## Key facts

- Cited by 144 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [DeepIM: Deep Iterative Matching for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00175/) (2018)
- [Deep Continuous Fusion for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10992/) (2020)
- [BOP: Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08319/) (2018)
- [Deep Object Pose Estimation for Semantic Robotic Grasping of Household Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10790/) (2018)
- [Pix2Pose: Pixel-Wise Coordinate Regression of Objects for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07433/) (2019)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)
- [DPOD: 6D Pose Object Detector and Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11020/) (2019)
- [PointFusion: Deep Sensor Fusion for 3D Bounding Box Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10871/) (2017)
- [Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01275/) (2019)
- [EPOS: Estimating 6D Pose of Objects with Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00605/) (2020)
- [Learning Canonical Shape Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09322/) (2020)
- [Deep Sliding Shapes for Amodal 3D Object Detection in RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02300/) (2015)
- [HybridPose: 6D Object Pose Estimation under Hybrid Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01869/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 144)

- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [GAPartNet: Cross-Category Domain-Generalizable Object Perception and Manipulation via Generalizable and Actionable Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05272/) (2022)
- [SAM-6D: Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-Shot 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15707/) (2023)
- [ZebraPose: Coarse to Fine Surface Encoding for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09418/) (2022)
- [GPV-Pose: Category-level Object Pose Estimation via Geometry-guided Point-wise Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07918/) (2022)
- [FS6D: Few-Shot 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14628/) (2022)
- [Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation in the Wild: A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach and A New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15436/) (2022)
- [FreeZe: Training-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation with geometric and vision foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00947/) (2023)
- [Parallel Inversion of Neural Radiance Fields for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10108/) (2022)
- [SAR-Net: Shape Alignment and Recovery Network for Category-level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14193/) (2021)
- [SecondPose: SE(3)-Consistent Dual-Stream Feature Fusion for Category-Level Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11125/) (2023)
- [Any6D: Model-free 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18673/) (2025)
- [TAX-Pose: Task-Specific Cross-Pose Estimation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09325/) (2022)
- [ClearPose: Large-scale Transparent Object Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03890/) (2022)
- [OVE6D: Object Viewpoint Encoding for Depth-based 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01072/) (2022)
- [RBP-Pose: Residual Bounding Box Projection for Category-Level Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00237/) (2022)
- [Instance-Adaptive and Geometric-Aware Keypoint Learning for Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19527/) (2024)
- [SSP-Pose: Symmetry-Aware Shape Prior Deformation for Direct Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06661/) (2022)
- [VI-Net: Boosting Category-level 6D Object Pose Estimation via Learning Decoupled Rotations on the Spherical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09916/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00990/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning on Monocular Object Pose Detection and Tracking: A Comprehensive Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14291/) (2021)
- [Iterative Corresponding Geometry: Fusing Region and Depth for Highly Efficient 3D Tracking of Textureless Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05334/) (2022)
- [Open-vocabulary object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00690/) (2023)
- [MatchU: Matching Unseen Objects for 6D Pose Estimation from RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01517/) (2024)
- [Vote from the Center: 6 DoF Pose Estimation in RGB-D Images by Radial Keypoint Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02527/) (2021)
- [UDA-COPE: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Category-level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12580/) (2021)
- [The Neural Process Family: Survey, Applications and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00517/) (2022)
- [Uni6D: A Unified CNN Framework without Projection Breakdown for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14531/) (2022)
- [Neural Correspondence Field for Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00113/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we present FFB6D, a Full Flow Bidirectional fusion network designed for 6D pose estimation from a single RGBD image. Our key insight is that appearance information in the RGB image and geometry information from the depth image are two complementary data sources, and it still remains unknown how to fully leverage them. Towards this end, we propose FFB6D, which learns to combine appearance and geometry information for representation learning as well as output representation selection. Specifically, at the representation learning stage, we build bidirectional fusion modules in the full flow of the two networks, where fusion is applied to each encoding and decoding layer. In this way, the two networks can leverage local and global complementary information from the other one to obtain better representations. Moreover, at the output representation stage, we designed a simple but effective 3D keypoints selection algorithm considering the texture and geometry information of objects, which simplifies keypoint localization for precise pose estimation. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins on several benchmarks. Code and video are available at urlhttps://github.com/ethnhe/FFB6D.git.