# MatchNorm: Learning-based Point Cloud Registration for 6D Object Pose Estimation in the Real World

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15309/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/) (2019)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [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)
- [TEASER: Fast and Certifiable Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07715/) (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)
- [PointNetLK: Robust & Efficient Point Cloud Registration using PointNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05711/) (2019)
- [Deep Global Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11540/) (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)
- [Pix2Pose: Pixel-Wise Coordinate Regression of Objects for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07433/) (2019)
- [DPOD: 6D Pose Object Detector and Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11020/) (2019)
- [RPM-Net: Robust Point Matching using Learned Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13479/) (2020)
- [PPFNet: Global Context Aware Local Features for Robust 3D Point Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02669/) (2018)
- [Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01275/) (2019)
- [Go-ICP: A Globally Optimal Solution to 3D ICP Point-Set Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03344/) (2016)
- [SPLATNet: Sparse Lattice Networks for Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08275/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [SE(3) Diffusion Model-based Point Cloud Registration for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17359/) (2023)
- [Robust Outlier Rejection for 3D Registration with Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01514/) (2023)
- [3D Vision with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04309/) (2022)
- [ZeroPose: CAD-Prompted Zero-shot Object 6D Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17934/) (2023)
- [HiPose: Hierarchical Binary Surface Encoding and Correspondence Pruning for RGB-D 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12588/) (2023)
- [Diff9D: Diffusion-Based Domain-Generalized Category-Level 9-DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02525/) (2025)
- [Geo6D: Geometric Constraints Learning for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10959/) (2022)
- [Registering Neural 4D Gaussians for Endoscopic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20213/) (2024)
- [AutoSynth: Learning to Generate 3D Training Data for Object Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11170/) (2023)
- [Correspondence Free Multivector Cloud Registration using Conformal Geometric Algebra](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11732/) (2024)
- [Level-Set Parameters: Novel Representation for 3D Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13502/) (2024)
- [DynOPETs: A Versatile Benchmark for Dynamic Object Pose Estimation and Tracking in Moving Camera Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19625/) (2025)
- [iMatcher: Improve matching in point cloud registration via local-to-global geometric consistency learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08982/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we tackle the task of estimating the 6D pose of an object from point cloud data. While recent learning-based approaches to addressing this task have shown great success on synthetic datasets, we have observed them to fail in the presence of real-world data. We thus analyze the causes of these failures, which we trace back to the difference between the feature distributions of the source and target point clouds, and the sensitivity of the widely-used SVD-based loss function to the range of rotation between the two point clouds. We address the first challenge by introducing a new normalization strategy, Match Normalization, and the second via the use of a loss function based on the negative log likelihood of point correspondences. Our two contributions are general and can be applied to many existing learning-based 3D object registration frameworks, which we illustrate by implementing them in two of them, DCP and IDAM. Our experiments on the real-scene TUD-L, LINEMOD and Occluded-LINEMOD datasets evidence the benefits of our strategies. They allow for the first time learning-based 3D object registration methods to achieve meaningful results on real-world data. We therefore expect them to be key to the future development of point cloud registration methods.