# Vote from the Center: 6 DoF Pose Estimation in RGB-D Images by Radial Keypoint Voting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02527 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02527/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (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)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [DeepIM: Deep Iterative Matching for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00175/) (2018)
- [SSD-6D: Making RGB-based 3D detection and 6D pose estimation great again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10006/) (2017)
- [Deep Object Pose Estimation for Semantic Robotic Grasping of Household Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10790/) (2018)
- [BB8: A Scalable, Accurate, Robust to Partial Occlusion Method for Predicting the 3D Poses of Challenging Objects without Using Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10896/) (2017)
- [Pix2Pose: Pixel-Wise Coordinate Regression of Objects for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07433/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Seamless Single Shot 6D Object Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08848/) (2017)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)
- [BOP Challenge 2020 on 6D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07378/) (2020)
- [DPOD: 6D Pose Object Detector and Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11020/) (2019)
- [EPOS: Estimating 6D Pose of Objects with Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00605/) (2020)
- [GDRNPP: A Geometry-guided and Fully Learning-based Object Pose Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12145/) (2021)
- [FFB6D: A Full Flow Bidirectional Fusion Network for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02242/) (2021)
- [PersonLab: Person Pose Estimation and Instance Segmentation with a Bottom-Up, Part-Based, Geometric Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08225/) (2018)
- [Segmentation-driven 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02541/) (2018)
- [6-DoF Object Pose from Semantic Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04670/) (2017)
- [Self6D: Self-Supervised Monocular 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06468/) (2020)
- [Making Deep Heatmaps Robust to Partial Occlusions for 3D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03959/) (2018)
- [Explaining the Ambiguity of Object Detection and 6D Pose From Visual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00287/) (2018)
- [Deep Model-Based 6D Pose Refinement in RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03065/) (2018)
- [EfficientPose: An efficient, accurate and scalable end-to-end 6D multi object pose estimation approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04307/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [SecondPose: SE(3)-Consistent Dual-Stream Feature Fusion for Category-Level Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11125/) (2023)
- [Instance-Adaptive and Geometric-Aware Keypoint Learning for Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19527/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning on Monocular Object Pose Detection and Tracking: A Comprehensive Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14291/) (2021)
- [ACR-Pose: Adversarial Canonical Representation Reconstruction Network for Category Level 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10524/) (2021)
- [HiPose: Hierarchical Binary Surface Encoding and Correspondence Pruning for RGB-D 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12588/) (2023)
- [Deep Fusion Transformer Network with Weighted Vector-Wise Keypoints Voting for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05438/) (2023)
- [Diff9D: Diffusion-Based Domain-Generalized Category-Level 9-DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02525/) (2025)
- [Scalable Unseen Objects 6-DoF Absolute Pose Estimation with Robotic Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05578/) (2025)
- [Keypoint Cascade Voting for Point Cloud Based 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08123/) (2022)
- [CPPF++: Uncertainty-Aware Sim2Real Object Pose Estimation by Vote Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13398/) (2022)
- [RDPN6D: Residual-based Dense Point-wise Network for 6Dof Object Pose Estimation Based on RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08483/) (2024)
- [Pseudo-keypoint RKHS Learning for Self-supervised 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09500/) (2023)
- [Learning Better Keypoints for Multi-Object 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07827/) (2023)
- [Advancing 6-DoF Instrument Pose Estimation in Variable X-Ray Imaging Geometries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11677/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Positional Encoding for Robust Multi-Reference-Based Object 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16284/) (2024)
- [KVN: Keypoints Voting Network with Differentiable RANSAC for Stereo Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11543/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Point-Wise Attention in 6D Object Pose Estimation Based on Bidirectional Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08518/) (2023)
- [KGpose: Keypoint-Graph Driven End-to-End Multi-Object 6D Pose Estimation via Point-Wise Pose Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08909/) (2024)
- [DLTPose: 6DoF Pose Estimation From Accurate Dense Surface Point Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07335/) (2025)
- [Ice Hockey Puck Localization Using Contextual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04365/) (2025)
- [VLM6D: VLM based 6Dof Pose Estimation based on RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00120/) (2025)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13565/) (2026)
- [Back to the Feature: Zero-Shot 6DoF Pose Estimation via Dense Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06726/) (2026)
- [G6D: Geometric Learning-Free RGB-D 6D Pose Solver for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23566/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel keypoint voting scheme based on intersecting spheres, that is more accurate than existing schemes and allows for fewer, more disperse keypoints. The scheme is based upon the distance between points, which as a 1D quantity can be regressed more accurately than the 2D and 3D vector and offset quantities regressed in previous work, yielding more accurate keypoint localization. The scheme forms the basis of the proposed RCVPose method for 6 DoF pose estimation of 3D objects in RGB-D data, which is particularly effective at handling occlusions. A CNN is trained to estimate the distance between the 3D point corresponding to the depth mode of each RGB pixel, and a set of 3 disperse keypoints defined in the object frame. At inference, a sphere centered at each 3D point is generated, of radius equal to this estimated distance. The surfaces of these spheres vote to increment a 3D accumulator space, the peaks of which indicate keypoint locations. The proposed radial voting scheme is more accurate than previous vector or offset schemes, and is robust to disperse keypoints. Experiments demonstrate RCVPose to be highly accurate and competitive, achieving state-of-the-art results on the LINEMOD 99.7% and YCB-Video 97.2% datasets, notably scoring +4.9% higher 71.1% than previous methods on the challenging Occlusion LINEMOD dataset, and on average outperforming all other published results from the BOP benchmark for these 3 datasets. Our code is available at http://www.github.com/aaronwool/rcvpose.