# PR-GCN: A Deep Graph Convolutional Network with Point Refinement for 6D Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09916/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [HybridPose: 6D Object Pose Estimation under Hybrid Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01869/) (2020)
- [Segmentation-driven 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02541/) (2018)
- [LatentFusion: End-to-End Differentiable Reconstruction and Rendering for Unseen Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00416/) (2019)
- [Single-Stage 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08324/) (2019)
- [KeyPose: Multi-View 3D Labeling and Keypoint Estimation for Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02805/) (2019)
- [Making Deep Heatmaps Robust to Partial Occlusions for 3D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03959/) (2018)
- [Multi-view Self-supervised Deep Learning for 6D Pose Estimation in the Amazon Picking Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09475/) (2016)
- [Viewpoints and Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6067/) (2014)
- [Deep Model-Based 6D Pose Refinement in RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03065/) (2018)
- [A Unified Framework for Multi-View Multi-Class Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08103/) (2018)
- [MoreFusion: Multi-object Reasoning for 6D Pose Estimation from Volumetric Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04336/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [ZebraPose: Coarse to Fine Surface Encoding for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09418/) (2022)
- [OVE6D: Object Viewpoint Encoding for Depth-based 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01072/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [HiPose: Hierarchical Binary Surface Encoding and Correspondence Pruning for RGB-D 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12588/) (2023)
- [A Graph-Based Approach for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17891/) (2023)
- [Deep Fusion Transformer Network with Weighted Vector-Wise Keypoints Voting for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05438/) (2023)
- [CheckerPose: Progressive Dense Keypoint Localization for Object Pose Estimation with Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16874/) (2023)
- [FDCT: Fast Depth Completion for Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12274/) (2023)
- [DCL-Net: Deep Correspondence Learning Network for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05232/) (2022)
- [Fusing Visual Appearance and Geometry for Multi-modality 6DoF Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11458/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Fully Convolutional Geometric Features for Object 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15514/) (2023)
- [TransPose: 6D Object Pose Estimation with Geometry-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16279/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks for Proprioceptive 6D Pose Estimation of In-hand Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15858/) (2023)
- [BiCo-Net: Regress Globally, Match Locally for Robust 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03536/) (2022)
- [Instance-Adaptive Keypoint Learning with Local-to-Global Geometric Aggregation for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15134/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Point-Wise Attention in 6D Object Pose Estimation Based on Bidirectional Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08518/) (2023)
- [DLTPose: 6DoF Pose Estimation From Accurate Dense Surface Point Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07335/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

RGB-D based 6D pose estimation has recently achieved remarkable progress, but still suffers from two major limitations: (1) ineffective representation of depth data and (2) insufficient integration of different modalities. This paper proposes a novel deep learning approach, namely Graph Convolutional Network with Point Refinement (PR-GCN), to simultaneously address the issues above in a unified way. It first introduces the Point Refinement Network (PRN) to polish 3D point clouds, recovering missing parts with noise removed. Subsequently, the Multi-Modal Fusion Graph Convolutional Network (MMF-GCN) is presented to strengthen RGB-D combination, which captures geometry-aware inter-modality correlation through local information propagation in the graph convolutional network. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely used benchmarks, and state-of-the-art performance is reached. Besides, it is also shown that the proposed PRN and MMF-GCN modules are well generalized to other frameworks.