# SpyroPose: SE(3) Pyramids for Object Pose Distribution Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05308 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05308/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [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)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [BOP Challenge 2020 on 6D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07378/) (2020)
- [Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01275/) (2019)
- [EPOS: Estimating 6D Pose of Objects with Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00605/) (2020)
- [HomebrewedDB: RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03167/) (2019)
- [SurfEmb: Dense and Continuous Correspondence Distributions for Object Pose Estimation with Learnt Surface Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13489/) (2021)
- [PoseRBPF: A Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter for 6D Object Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09304/) (2019)
- [Explaining the Ambiguity of Object Detection and 6D Pose From Visual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00287/) (2018)
- [Implicit-PDF: Non-Parametric Representation of Probability Distributions on the Rotation Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05965/) (2021)
- [Deep Directional Statistics: Pose Estimation with Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03430/) (2018)
- [Deep Bingham Networks: Dealing with Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11002/) (2020)
- [Learning Orientation Distributions for Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01418/) (2020)
- [Fast Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07748/) (2020)
- [Image to Sphere: Learning Equivariant Features for Efficient Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13926/) (2023)
- [Ki-Pode: Keypoint-based Implicit Pose Distribution Estimation of Rigid Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09659/) (2022)
- [Multi-view object pose estimation from correspondence distributions and epipolar geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00924/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [MatchU: Matching Unseen Objects for 6D Pose Estimation from RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01517/) (2024)
- [GCE-Pose: Global Context Enhancement for Category-level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04293/) (2025)
- [BOP-Distrib: Revisiting 6D Pose Estimation Benchmarks for Better Evaluation under Visual Ambiguities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17297/) (2024)
- [Active 6D Pose Estimation for Textureless Objects using Multi-View RGB Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03726/) (2025)
- [Corr2Distrib: Making Ambiguous Correspondences an Ally to Predict Reliable 6D Pose Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02501/) (2025)
- [Alignist: CAD-Informed Orientation Distribution Estimation by Fusing Shape and Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06683/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Probabilistic Geometry-Guided Regression for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11819/) (2024)
- [Object Pose Distribution Estimation for Determining Revolution and Reflection Uncertainty in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07211/) (2025)
- [Towards Symmetry-sensitive Pose Estimation: A Rotation Representation for Symmetric Object Classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18208/) (2026)
- [SABER-6D: Shape Representation Based Implicit Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05867/) (2024)
- [Consensus-Driven Uncertainty for Robotic Grasping based on RGB Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20045/) (2025)
- [Aleatoric Uncertainty from AI-based 6D Object Pose Predictors for Object-relative State Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01583/) (2025)
- [Landscape-Awareness for Geometric View Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19865/) (2026)
- [Towards a Modular Bin-picking Framework for Handling Object Pose Uncertainties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13698/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object pose estimation is a core computer vision problem and often an essential component in robotics. Pose estimation is usually approached by seeking the single best estimate of an object's pose, but this approach is ill-suited for tasks involving visual ambiguity. In such cases it is desirable to estimate the uncertainty as a pose distribution to allow downstream tasks to make informed decisions. Pose distributions can have arbitrary complexity which motivates estimating unparameterized distributions, however, until now they have only been used for orientation estimation on SO(3) due to the difficulty in training on and normalizing over SE(3). We propose a novel method for pose distribution estimation on SE(3). We use a hierarchical grid, a pyramid, which enables efficient importance sampling during training and sparse evaluation of the pyramid at inference, allowing real time 6D pose distribution estimation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on SO(3), and to the best of our knowledge, we provide the first quantitative results on pose distribution estimation on SE(3). Code will be available at spyropose.github.io