# FreeZe: Training-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation with geometric and vision foundation models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2023.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [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)
- [BOP: Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08319/) (2018)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [MegaPose: 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Render & Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06870/) (2022)
- [PointCLIP V2: Prompting CLIP and GPT for Powerful 3D Open-world Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11682/) (2022)
- [OnePose: One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12257/) (2022)
- [FFB6D: A Full Flow Bidirectional Fusion Network for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02242/) (2021)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)
- [SAM-6D: Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-Shot 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15707/) (2023)
- [OnePose++: Keypoint-Free One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07673/) (2023)
- [GigaPose: Fast and Robust Novel Object Pose Estimation via One Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14155/) (2023)
- [HomebrewedDB: RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03167/) (2019)
- [FoundPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with Foundation Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18809/) (2023)
- [3D Point Capsule Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10775/) (2018)
- [DualPoseNet: Category-level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation Using Dual Pose Network with Refined Learning of Pose Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06526/) (2021)
- [CNOS: A Strong Baseline for CAD-based Novel Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11067/) (2023)
- [FS6D: Few-Shot 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14628/) (2022)
- [Recovering 6D Object Pose and Predicting Next-Best-View in the Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.07506/) (2015)
- [BOP Challenge 2022 on Detection, Segmentation and Pose Estimation of Specific Rigid Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13075/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Any6D: Model-free 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18673/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00990/) (2025)
- [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)
- [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)
- [UNOPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with an Unposed RGB-D Reference Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16106/) (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)
- [PoseTraj: Pose-Aware Trajectory Control in Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16068/) (2025)
- [Simultaneous Tactile-Visual Perception for Learning Multimodal Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09851/) (2025)
- [ConceptPose: Training-Free Zero-Shot Object Pose Estimation using Concept Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09056/) (2025)
- [A dataset-free approach for self-supervised learning of 3D reflectional symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02660/) (2025)
- [Distilling 3D distinctive local descriptors for 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15106/) (2025)
- [Comparative Evaluation of 3D Reconstruction Methods for Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08234/) (2024)
- [CHIP: A multi-sensor dataset for 6D pose estimation of chairs in industrial settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09699/) (2025)
- [UnPose: Uncertainty-Guided Diffusion Priors for Zero-Shot Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15972/) (2025)
- [OSCAR: Open-Set CAD Retrieval from a Language Prompt and a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07333/) (2026)
- [IndustryShapes: An RGB-D Benchmark dataset for 6D object pose estimation of industrial assembly components and tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05555/) (2026)
- [Zero-shot Inexact CAD Model Alignment from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03292/) (2025)
- [SingRef6D: Monocular Novel Object Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21927/) (2025)
- [OPFormer: Object Pose Estimation leveraging foundation model with geometric encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12614/) (2025)
- [CoordAR: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Autoregressive Coordinate Map Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12919/) (2025)
- [WALDO: Where Unseen Model-based 6D Pose Estimation Meets Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15874/) (2025)
- [Object Pose Distribution Estimation for Determining Revolution and Reflection Uncertainty in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07211/) (2025)
- [Finding NeMO: A Geometry-Aware Representation of Template Views for Few-Shot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04343/) (2026)
- [COG: Confidence-aware Optimal Geometric Correspondence for Unsupervised Single-reference Novel Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00493/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the 6D pose of objects unseen during training is highly desirable yet challenging. Zero-shot object 6D pose estimation methods address this challenge by leveraging additional task-specific supervision provided by large-scale, photo-realistic synthetic datasets. However, their performance heavily depends on the quality and diversity of rendered data and they require extensive training. In this work, we show how to tackle the same task but without training on specific data. We propose FreeZe, a novel solution that harnesses the capabilities of pre-trained geometric and vision foundation models. FreeZe leverages 3D geometric descriptors learned from unrelated 3D point clouds and 2D visual features learned from web-scale 2D images to generate discriminative 3D point-level descriptors. We then estimate the 6D pose of unseen objects by 3D registration based on RANSAC. We also introduce a novel algorithm to solve ambiguous cases due to geometrically symmetric objects that is based on visual features. We comprehensively evaluate FreeZe across the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, which include over a hundred 3D objects and 20,000 images captured in various scenarios. FreeZe consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including competitors extensively trained on synthetic 6D pose estimation data. Code will be publicly available at https://andreacaraffa.github.io/freeze.