Uncertainty Quantification with Deep Ensembles for 6D Object Pose Estimation

The estimation of 6D object poses is a fundamental task in many computer vision applications. Particularly, in high risk scenarios such as human-robot interaction, industrial inspection, and automation, reliable pose estimates are crucial. In the last years, increasingly accurate and robust deep-learning-based approaches for 6D object pose estimation have been proposed. Many top-performing methods are not end-to-end trainable but consist of multiple stages. In the context of deep uncertainty quantification, deep ensembles are considered as state of the art since they have been proven to produce well-calibrated and robust uncertainty estimates. However, deep ensembles can only be applied to methods that can be trained end-to-end. In this work, we propose a method to quantify the uncertainty of multi-stage 6D object pose estimation approaches with deep ensembles. For the implementation, we choose SurfEmb as representative, since it is one of the top-performing 6D object pose estimation approaches in the BOP Challenge 2022. We apply established metrics and concepts for deep uncertainty quantification to evaluate the results. Furthermore, we propose a novel uncertainty calibration score for regression tasks to quantify the quality of the estimated uncertainty.