# Robust Category-Level 3D Pose Estimation from Synthetic Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16124/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05547/) (2015)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [DeepIM: Deep Iterative Matching for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00175/) (2018)
- [3D Bounding Box Estimation Using Deep Learning and Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00496/) (2016)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)
- [HyperFace: A Deep Multi-task Learning Framework for Face Detection, Landmark Localization, Pose Estimation, and Gender Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01249/) (2016)
- [Category Level Object Pose Estimation via Neural Analysis-by-Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08145/) (2020)
- [Render for CNN: Viewpoint Estimation in Images Using CNNs Trained with Rendered 3D Model Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05641/) (2015)
- [6-DoF Object Pose from Semantic Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04670/) (2017)
- [Beyond Sharing Weights for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06432/) (2016)
- [Learning from Synthetic Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08265/) (2019)
- [RePOSE: Fast 6D Object Pose Refinement via Deep Texture Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00633/) (2021)
- [Viewpoints and Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6067/) (2014)
- [Synthesizing Training Images for Boosting Human 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02703/) (2016)
- [OOD-CV: A Benchmark for Robustness to Out-of-Distribution Shifts of Individual Nuisances in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14341/) (2021)
- [StarMap for Category-Agnostic Keypoint and Viewpoint Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09331/) (2018)
- [NeMo: Neural Mesh Models of Contrastive Features for Robust 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12378/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Source-Free and Image-Only Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Category Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10848/) (2024)
- [DINeMo: Learning Neural Mesh Models with no 3D Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20220/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Obtaining accurate 3D object poses is vital for numerous computer vision applications, such as 3D reconstruction and scene understanding. However, annotating real-world objects is time-consuming and challenging. While synthetically generated training data is a viable alternative, the domain shift between real and synthetic data is a significant challenge. In this work, we aim to narrow the performance gap between models trained on synthetic data and few real images and fully supervised models trained on large-scale data. We achieve this by approaching the problem from two perspectives: 1) We introduce SyntheticP3D, a new synthetic dataset for object pose estimation generated from CAD models and enhanced with a novel algorithm. 2) We propose a novel approach (CC3D) for training neural mesh models that perform pose estimation via inverse rendering. In particular, we exploit the spatial relationships between features on the mesh surface and a contrastive learning scheme to guide the domain adaptation process. Combined, these two approaches enable our models to perform competitively with state-of-the-art models using only 10% of the respective real training images, while outperforming the SOTA model by 10.4% with a threshold of pi/18 using only 50% of the real training data. Our trained model further demonstrates robust generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios despite being trained with minimal real data.