# Self-supervised Vision Transformers for 3D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00962/) (2019)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [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)
- [BOP: Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08319/) (2018)
- [Pix2Pose: Pixel-Wise Coordinate Regression of Objects for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07433/) (2019)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [Cut, Paste and Learn: Surprisingly Easy Synthesis for Instance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01642/) (2017)
- [MegaPose: 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Render & Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06870/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GDRNPP: A Geometry-guided and Fully Learning-based Object Pose Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12145/) (2021)
- [OSOP: A Multi-Stage One Shot Object Pose Estimation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15533/) (2022)
- [BlenderProc](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01911/) (2019)
- [BOP Challenge 2022 on Detection, Segmentation and Pose Estimation of Specific Rigid Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13075/) (2023)
- [Learning Descriptors for Object Recognition and 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05908/) (2015)

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

- [FoundPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with Foundation Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18809/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Imaginarium: Vision-guided High-Quality 3D Scene Layout Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15564/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16668/) (2024)
- [OSCAR: Open-Set CAD Retrieval from a Language Prompt and a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07333/) (2026)
- [Multi-Modal 3D Mesh Reconstruction from Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07190/) (2025)
- [SCOPE: Semantic Conditioning for Sim2Real Category-Level Object Pose Estimation in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24572/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object pose estimation is important for object manipulation and scene understanding. In order to improve the general applicability of pose estimators, recent research focuses on providing estimates for novel objects, that is objects unseen during training. Such works use deep template matching strategies to retrieve the closest template connected to a query image. This template retrieval implicitly provides object class and pose. Despite the recent success and improvements of Vision Transformers over CNNs for many vision tasks, the state of the art uses CNN-based approaches for novel object pose estimation. This work evaluates and demonstrates the differences between self-supervised CNNs and Vision Transformers for deep template matching. In detail, both types of approaches are trained using contrastive learning to match training images against rendered templates of isolated objects. At test time, such templates are matched against query images of known and novel objects under challenging settings, such as clutter, occlusion and object symmetries, using masked cosine similarity. The presented results not only demonstrate that Vision Transformers improve in matching accuracy over CNNs, but also that for some cases pre-trained Vision Transformers do not need fine-tuning to do so. Furthermore, we highlight the differences in optimization and network architecture when comparing these two types of network for deep template matching.