# KDFNet: Learning Keypoint Distance Field for 6D Object Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10127 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10127/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [SSD-6D: Making RGB-based 3D detection and 6D pose estimation great again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10006/) (2017)
- [FlowNet3D: Learning Scene Flow in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01411/) (2018)
- [Pix2Pose: Pixel-Wise Coordinate Regression of Objects for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07433/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Offboard 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05073/) (2021)
- [MeteorNet: Deep Learning on Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09165/) (2019)
- [HybridPose: 6D Object Pose Estimation under Hybrid Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01869/) (2020)
- [6-DoF Object Pose from Semantic Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04670/) (2017)
- [Discovery of Latent 3D Keypoints via End-to-end Geometric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03146/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning of Local RGB-D Patches for 3D Object Detection and 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06038/) (2016)
- [Learning Video Representations from Correspondence Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07853/) (2019)
- [Object Pose Estimation from Monocular Image using Multi-View Keypoint Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00553/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ZS6D: Zero-shot 6D Object Pose Estimation using Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11986/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Challenges for Monocular 6D Object Pose Estimation in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12172/) (2023)
- [6DOPE-GS: Online 6D Object Pose Estimation using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01543/) (2024)
- [V-MAO: Generative Modeling for Multi-Arm Manipulation of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03987/) (2021)
- [Structure-Aware Correspondence Learning for Relative Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18671/) (2025)
- [Open Challenges for Monocular Single-shot 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11827/) (2023)
- [VAPO: Visibility-Aware Keypoint Localization for Efficient 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14559/) (2024)
- [DKPMV: Dense Keypoints Fusion from Multi-View RGB Frames for 6D Pose Estimation of Textureless Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10933/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present KDFNet, a novel method for 6D object pose estimation from RGB images. To handle occlusion, many recent works have proposed to localize 2D keypoints through pixel-wise voting and solve a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem for pose estimation, which achieves leading performance. However, such voting process is direction-based and cannot handle long and thin objects where the direction intersections cannot be robustly found. To address this problem, we propose a novel continuous representation called Keypoint Distance Field (KDF) for projected 2D keypoint locations. Formulated as a 2D array, each element of the KDF stores the 2D Euclidean distance between the corresponding image pixel and a specified projected 2D keypoint. We use a fully convolutional neural network to regress the KDF for each keypoint. Using this KDF encoding of projected object keypoint locations, we propose to use a distance-based voting scheme to localize the keypoints by calculating circle intersections in a RANSAC fashion. We validate the design choices of our framework by extensive ablation experiments. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Occlusion LINEMOD dataset with an average ADD(-S) accuracy of 50.3% and TOD dataset mug subset with an average ADD accuracy of 75.72%. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that the proposed method is able to robustly estimate the 6D pose in challenging scenarios including occlusion.