# SAM-6D: Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-Shot 6D Object Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 117 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Analysis: an Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10517/) (2023)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [Inpaint Anything: Segment Anything Meets Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06790/) (2023)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [MegaPose: 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Render & Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06870/) (2022)
- [FLatten Transformer: Vision Transformer using Focused Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00442/) (2023)
- [Shape Prior Deformation for Categorical 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08454/) (2020)
- [OnePose: One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12257/) (2022)
- [SAM3D: Segment Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03908/) (2023)
- [GDRNPP: A Geometry-guided and Fully Learning-based Object Pose Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12145/) (2021)
- [FFB6D: A Full Flow Bidirectional Fusion Network for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02242/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 117)

- [FoundPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with Foundation Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18809/) (2023)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [BOP Challenge 2023 on Detection, Segmentation and Pose Estimation of Seen and Unseen Rigid Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09799/) (2024)
- [FreeZe: Training-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation with geometric and vision foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00947/) (2023)
- [SpatialPIN: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Vision-Language Models through Prompting and Interacting 3D Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13438/) (2024)
- [Dual Memory Networks: A Versatile Adaptation Approach for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17589/) (2024)
- [Any6D: Model-free 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18673/) (2025)
- [DeformGS: Scene Flow in Highly Deformable Scenes for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00583/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11537/) (2024)
- [Improving the Generalization of Segmentation Foundation Model under Distribution Shift via Weakly Supervised Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03502/) (2023)
- [HUMOTO: A 4D Dataset of Mocap Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10414/) (2025)
- [F-HOI: Toward Fine-grained Semantic-Aligned 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12435/) (2024)
- [BOP Challenge 2024 on Model-Based and Model-Free 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02812/) (2025)
- [GCE-Pose: Global Context Enhancement for Category-level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04293/) (2025)
- [One2Any: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation for Any Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04109/) (2025)
- [Adapting Pre-Trained Vision Models for Novel Instance Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17859/) (2024)
- [GS-Pose: Generalizable Segmentation-based 6D Object Pose Estimation with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10683/) (2024)
- [Co-op: Correspondence-based Novel Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17731/) (2025)
- [Accurate and efficient zero-shot 6D pose estimation with frozen foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09784/) (2025)
- [Segment Anything with Multiple Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09085/) (2024)
- [IKEA Manuals at Work: 4D Grounding of Assembly Instructions on Internet Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11409/) (2024)
- [UNOPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with an Unposed RGB-D Reference Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16106/) (2024)
- [6DOPE-GS: Online 6D Object Pose Estimation using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01543/) (2024)
- [Scalable Unseen Objects 6-DoF Absolute Pose Estimation with Robotic Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05578/) (2025)
- [High-resolution open-vocabulary object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16384/) (2024)
- [UA-Pose: Uncertainty-Aware 6D Object Pose Estimation and Online Object Completion with Partial References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07996/) (2025)
- [Manual-PA: Learning 3D Part Assembly from Instruction Diagrams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18011/) (2024)
- [XYZ-IBD: Benchmarking Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation under Real-World Industrial Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00599/) (2025)
- [RA-DP: Rapid Adaptive Diffusion Policy for Training-Free High-frequency Robotics Replanning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04051/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot 6D object pose estimation involves the detection of novel objects with their 6D poses in cluttered scenes, presenting significant challenges for model generalizability. Fortunately, the recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) has showcased remarkable zero-shot transfer performance, which provides a promising solution to tackle this task. Motivated by this, we introduce SAM-6D, a novel framework designed to realize the task through two steps, including instance segmentation and pose estimation. Given the target objects, SAM-6D employs two dedicated sub-networks, namely Instance Segmentation Model (ISM) and Pose Estimation Model (PEM), to perform these steps on cluttered RGB-D images. ISM takes SAM as an advanced starting point to generate all possible object proposals and selectively preserves valid ones through meticulously crafted object matching scores in terms of semantics, appearance and geometry. By treating pose estimation as a partial-to-partial point matching problem, PEM performs a two-stage point matching process featuring a novel design of background tokens to construct dense 3D-3D correspondence, ultimately yielding the pose estimates. Without bells and whistles, SAM-6D outperforms the existing methods on the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark for both instance segmentation and pose estimation of novel objects.