# PoseDiffusion: Solving Pose Estimation via Diffusion-aided Bundle Adjustment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15667 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15667/

## Key facts

- Cited by 147 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [LIFT: Learned Invariant Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09114/) (2016)
- [DSAC - Differentiable RANSAC for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05705/) (2016)
- [SSD-6D: Making RGB-based 3D detection and 6D pose estimation great again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10006/) (2017)
- [Image Matching across Wide Baselines: From Paper to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01587/) (2020)
- [DeMoN: Depth and Motion Network for Learning Monocular Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02401/) (2016)
- [Pixel-Perfect Structure-from-Motion with Featuremetric Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08291/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Probably Symmetric Deformable 3D Objects from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11130/) (2019)
- [BA-Net: Dense Bundle Adjustment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04807/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08493/) (2017)
- [Learning Two-View Correspondences and Geometry Using Order-Aware Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04964/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 147)

- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (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)
- [MASt3R-SfM: a Fully-Integrated Solution for Unconstrained Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19152/) (2024)
- [Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11539/) (2025)
- [MV-DUSt3R+: Single-Stage Scene Reconstruction from Sparse Views In 2 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06974/) (2024)
- [MUSt3R: Multi-view Network for Stereo 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01661/) (2025)
- [Cameras as Rays: Pose Estimation via Ray Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14817/) (2024)
- [Flash3D: Feed-Forward Generalisable 3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04343/) (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)
- [Pow3R: Empowering Unconstrained 3D Reconstruction with Camera and Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17316/) (2025)
- [WorldMirror: Universal 3D World Reconstruction with Any-Prior Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10726/) (2025)
- [MegaScenes: Scene-Level View Synthesis at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11819/) (2024)
- [Video-Guided Foley Sound Generation with Multimodal Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17698/) (2024)
- [Light3R-SfM: Towards Feed-forward Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14914/) (2025)
- [Dens3R: A Foundation Model for 3D Geometry Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16290/) (2025)
- [FreeSplatter: Pose-free Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09573/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DUNE: Distilling a Universal Encoder from Heterogeneous 2D and 3D Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14405/) (2025)
- [Robust Incremental Structure-from-Motion with Hybrid Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19811/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing People, Places, and Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17806/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camera pose estimation is a long-standing computer vision problem that to date often relies on classical methods, such as handcrafted keypoint matching, RANSAC and bundle adjustment. In this paper, we propose to formulate the Structure from Motion (SfM) problem inside a probabilistic diffusion framework, modelling the conditional distribution of camera poses given input images. This novel view of an old problem has several advantages. (i) The nature of the diffusion framework mirrors the iterative procedure of bundle adjustment. (ii) The formulation allows a seamless integration of geometric constraints from epipolar geometry. (iii) It excels in typically difficult scenarios such as sparse views with wide baselines. (iv) The method can predict intrinsics and extrinsics for an arbitrary amount of images. We demonstrate that our method PoseDiffusion significantly improves over the classic SfM pipelines and the learned approaches on two real-world datasets. Finally, it is observed that our method can generalize across datasets without further training. Project page: https://posediffusion.github.io/