# Diff-DOPE: Differentiable Deep Object Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00463 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00463/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03277/) (2020)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [DeepIM: Deep Iterative Matching for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00175/) (2018)
- [SSD-6D: Making RGB-based 3D detection and 6D pose estimation great again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10006/) (2017)
- [Deep Object Pose Estimation for Semantic Robotic Grasping of Household Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10790/) (2018)
- [Kornia: an Open Source Differentiable Computer Vision Library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02190/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Real-Time Seamless Single Shot 6D Object Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08848/) (2017)
- [MegaPose: 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Render & Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06870/) (2022)
- [DPOD: 6D Pose Object Detector and Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11020/) (2019)
- [CodeNeRF: Disentangled Neural Radiance Fields for Object Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01750/) (2021)
- [Shape, Light, and Material Decomposition from Images using Monte Carlo Rendering and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03380/) (2022)
- [BundleSDF: Neural 6-DoF Tracking and 3D Reconstruction of Unknown Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14158/) (2023)
- [Gen6D: Generalizable Model-Free 6-DoF Object Pose Estimation from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10776/) (2022)
- [OnePose++: Keypoint-Free One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07673/) (2023)
- [HybridPose: 6D Object Pose Estimation under Hybrid Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01869/) (2020)
- [Segmentation-driven 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02541/) (2018)
- [Kaolin: A PyTorch Library for Accelerating 3D Deep Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05063/) (2019)
- [SurfEmb: Dense and Continuous Correspondence Distributions for Object Pose Estimation with Learnt Surface Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13489/) (2021)
- [se(3)-TrackNet: Data-driven 6D Pose Tracking by Calibrating Image Residuals in Synthetic Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13866/) (2020)
- [6-DoF Object Pose from Semantic Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04670/) (2017)
- [BundleTrack: 6D Pose Tracking for Novel Objects without Instance or Category-Level 3D Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00516/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [GigaPose: Fast and Robust Novel Object Pose Estimation via One Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14155/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Neural feels with neural fields: Visuo-tactile perception for in-hand manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13469/) (2023)
- [NeRFs in Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01333/) (2024)
- [V-HOP: Visuo-Haptic 6D Object Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17434/) (2025)
- [Recovering Parametric Scenes from Very Few Time-of-Flight Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16132/) (2025)
- [Lucida: Parse, Generate, and Place for Composable Real-to-Sim Scene Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30821/) (2026)
- [MixRI: Mixing Features of Reference Images for Novel Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06883/) (2026)
- [Pose Anything Anywhere:Model-free Object Poses from Arbitrary References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23634/) (2026)
- [Scene Parameter Saliency via Differentiable Light Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21562/) (2026)
- [G6D: Geometric Learning-Free RGB-D 6D Pose Solver for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23566/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Diff-DOPE, a 6-DoF pose refiner that takes as input an image, a 3D textured model of an object, and an initial pose of the object. The method uses differentiable rendering to update the object pose to minimize the visual error between the image and the projection of the model. We show that this simple, yet effective, idea is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on pose estimation datasets. Our approach is a departure from recent methods in which the pose refiner is a deep neural network trained on a large synthetic dataset to map inputs to refinement steps. Rather, our use of differentiable rendering allows us to avoid training altogether. Our approach performs multiple gradient descent optimizations in parallel with different random learning rates to avoid local minima from symmetric objects, similar appearances, or wrong step size. Various modalities can be used, e.g., RGB, depth, intensity edges, and object segmentation masks. We present experiments examining the effect of various choices, showing that the best results are found when the RGB image is accompanied by an object mask and depth image to guide the optimization process.