# RelPose++: Recovering 6D Poses from Sparse-view Observations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11486/) (2019)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [SparseFusion: Distilling View-conditioned Diffusion for 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00792/) (2022)
- [Stereo Magnification: Learning View Synthesis using Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09817/) (2018)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [DeepVO: Towards End-to-End Visual Odometry with Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08429/) (2017)
- [Objectron: A Large Scale Dataset of Object-Centric Videos in the Wild with Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09988/) (2020)
- [Perceiving 3D Human-Object Spatial Arrangements from a Single Image in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15649/) (2020)
- [NeRS: Neural Reflectance Surfaces for Sparse-view 3D Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07604/) (2021)
- [VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/) (2017)
- [RelPose: Predicting Probabilistic Relative Rotation for Single Objects in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05963/) (2022)
- [Universal Correspondence Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03558/) (2016)
- [Explaining the Ambiguity of Object Detection and 6D Pose From Visual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00287/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [Visual Geometry Grounded Deep Structure From Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04563/) (2023)
- [FLARE: Feed-forward Geometry, Appearance and Camera Estimation from Uncalibrated Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12138/) (2025)
- [PF-LRM: Pose-Free Large Reconstruction Model for Joint Pose and Shape Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12024/) (2023)
- [MASt3R-SfM: a Fully-Integrated Solution for Unconstrained Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19152/) (2024)
- [PoseDiffusion: Solving Pose Estimation via Diffusion-aided Bundle Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15667/) (2023)
- [Cameras as Rays: Pose Estimation via Ray Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14817/) (2024)
- [RGBD Objects in the Wild: Scaling Real-World 3D Object Learning from RGB-D Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12592/) (2024)
- [SpatialTrackerV2: 3D Point Tracking Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12462/) (2025)
- [Reloc3r: Large-Scale Training of Relative Camera Pose Regression for Generalizable, Fast, and Accurate Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08376/) (2024)
- [Scene Coordinate Reconstruction: Posing of Image Collections via Incremental Learning of a Relocalizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14351/) (2024)
- [Pow3R: Empowering Unconstrained 3D Reconstruction with Camera and Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17316/) (2025)
- [LEAP: Liberate Sparse-view 3D Modeling from Camera Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01410/) (2023)
- [Light3R-SfM: Towards Feed-forward Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14914/) (2025)
- [Matrix3D: Large Photogrammetry Model All-in-One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07685/) (2025)
- [No Pose at All: Self-Supervised Pose-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01171/) (2025)
- [AerialMegaDepth: Learning Aerial-Ground Reconstruction and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13157/) (2025)
- [SpaRP: Fast 3D Object Reconstruction and Pose Estimation from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10195/) (2024)
- [SplatFlow: Multi-View Rectified Flow Model for 3D Gaussian Splatting Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16443/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing People, Places, and Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17806/) (2024)
- [Open-vocabulary object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00690/) (2023)
- [E-RayZer: Self-supervised 3D Reconstruction as Spatial Visual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10950/) (2025)
- [ZeroPose: CAD-Prompted Zero-shot Object 6D Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17934/) (2023)
- [SAIL-Recon: Large SfM by Augmenting Scene Regression with Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17972/) (2025)
- [One2Any: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation for Any Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04109/) (2025)
- [UpFusion: Novel View Diffusion from Unposed Sparse View Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06661/) (2023)
- [iFusion: Inverting Diffusion for Pose-Free Reconstruction from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17250/) (2023)
- [DiffusionSfM: Predicting Structure and Motion via Ray Origin and Endpoint Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05473/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the task of estimating 6D camera poses from sparse-view image sets (2-8 images). This task is a vital pre-processing stage for nearly all contemporary (neural) reconstruction algorithms but remains challenging given sparse views, especially for objects with visual symmetries and texture-less surfaces. We build on the recent RelPose framework which learns a network that infers distributions over relative rotations over image pairs. We extend this approach in two key ways; first, we use attentional transformer layers to process multiple images jointly, since additional views of an object may resolve ambiguous symmetries in any given image pair (such as the handle of a mug that becomes visible in a third view). Second, we augment this network to also report camera translations by defining an appropriate coordinate system that decouples the ambiguity in rotation estimation from translation prediction. Our final system results in large improvements in 6D pose prediction over prior art on both seen and unseen object categories and also enables pose estimation and 3D reconstruction for in-the-wild objects.