# PoseContrast: Class-Agnostic Object Viewpoint Estimation in the Wild with Pose-Aware Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [3D Bounding Box Estimation Using Deep Learning and Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00496/) (2016)
- [SSD-6D: Making RGB-based 3D detection and 6D pose estimation great again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10006/) (2017)
- [What Should Not Be Contrastive in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05659/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Pix3D: Dataset and Methods for Single-Image 3D Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04610/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [MegaPose: 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Render & Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06870/) (2022)
- [RelPose++: Recovering 6D Poses from Sparse-view Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04926/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03635/) (2022)
- [Templates for 3D Object Pose Estimation Revisited: Generalization to New Objects and Robustness to Occlusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17234/) (2022)
- [GenFlow: Generalizable Recurrent Flow for 6D Pose Refinement of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11510/) (2024)
- [LARGE: Latent-Based Regression through GAN Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11186/) (2021)
- [Fusing Local Similarities for Retrieval-based 3D Orientation Estimation of Unseen Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08472/) (2022)
- [DISP6D: Disentangled Implicit Shape and Pose Learning for Scalable 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12549/) (2021)
- [You Only Look at One: Category-Level Object Representations for Pose Estimation From a Single Example](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12626/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Category-Level 3D Pose from Object-Centric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04384/) (2024)
- [Local Manifold Augmentation for Multiview Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02798/) (2022)
- [3D-Augmented Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Image-based Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02531/) (2022)
- [Category-Level Pose Retrieval with Contrastive Features Learnt with Occlusion Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06195/) (2022)
- [Accidental Turntables: Learning 3D Pose by Watching Objects Turn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06300/) (2022)
- [VOCAL: Visual Odometry via ContrAstive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00243/) (2025)
- [Learning Point Cloud Representations with Pose Continuity for Depth-Based Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14358/) (2025)
- [HACMatch Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression with Hardness-Aware Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21583/) (2026)
- [Every9D-21M: Large-Scale Real-World 9D Canonicalization of Everyday Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28270/) (2026)
- [Moving6DPoSe: A Multimodal Database for Monocular 6D Pose Estimation and Segmentation of Moving Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26161/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Motivated by the need for estimating the 3D pose of arbitrary objects, we consider the challenging problem of class-agnostic object viewpoint estimation from images only, without CAD model knowledge. The idea is to leverage features learned on seen classes to estimate the pose for classes that are unseen, yet that share similar geometries and canonical frames with seen classes. We train a direct pose estimator in a class-agnostic way by sharing weights across all object classes, and we introduce a contrastive learning method that has three main ingredients: (i) the use of pre-trained, self-supervised, contrast-based features; (ii) pose-aware data augmentations; (iii) a pose-aware contrastive loss. We experimented on Pascal3D+, ObjectNet3D and Pix3D in a cross-dataset fashion, with both seen and unseen classes. We report state-of-the-art results, including against methods that additionally use CAD models as input.