# Object Pose Estimation via the Aggregation of Diffusion Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18791 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18791/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14334/) (2023)
- [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)
- [BOP Challenge 2020 on 6D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07378/) (2020)
- [DPOD: 6D Pose Object Detector and Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11020/) (2019)
- [Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12469/) (2023)
- [GigaPose: Fast and Robust Novel Object Pose Estimation via One Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14155/) (2023)
- [FoundPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with Foundation Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18809/) (2023)
- [SurfEmb: Dense and Continuous Correspondence Distributions for Object Pose Estimation with Learnt Surface Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13489/) (2021)
- [CNOS: A Strong Baseline for CAD-based Novel Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11067/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Accurate and efficient zero-shot 6D pose estimation with frozen foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09784/) (2025)
- [Scalable Unseen Objects 6-DoF Absolute Pose Estimation with Robotic Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05578/) (2025)
- [Reasoning and Learning a Perceptual Metric for Self-Training of Reflective Objects in Bin-Picking with a Low-cost Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20207/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Single-view Object Pose Estimation by Two-side Generating and Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15860/) (2024)
- [Foundation Feature-Driven Online End-Effector Pose Estimation: A Marker-Free and Learning-Free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14051/) (2025)
- [Beyond Synthetic Replays: Turning Diffusion Features into Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23402/) (2025)
- [Parallel Sampling of Diffusion Models on SO(3)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10347/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Prior Knowledge of Diffusion Model for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01841/) (2025)
- [Towards Human-Level 3D Relative Pose Estimation: Generalizable, Training-Free, with Single Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18453/) (2024)
- [MixRI: Mixing Features of Reference Images for Novel Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06883/) (2026)
- [RRTrack: Robust and Recoverable Object 6D Pose Tracking for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the pose of objects from images is a crucial task of 3D scene understanding, and recent approaches have shown promising results on very large benchmarks. However, these methods experience a significant performance drop when dealing with unseen objects. To address this problem, we have an in-depth analysis on the features of diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion, which hold substantial potential for modeling unseen objects. Based on this analysis, we then innovatively introduce these diffusion features for object pose estimation. To verify the efficacy of diffusion features for object pose estimation, we propose three distinct architectures (vanilla, nonlinear, and context-aware weight aggregations) that capture and aggregate diffusion features for comparative analysis. To achieve an efficient feature aggregation, we propose a confidence adaptive aggregation network that automatically selects the discriminative features rather than uses all the features, achieving a better speed-and-accuracy trade-off. In particular, our confidence adaptive aggregation network achieves higher accuracy than the previous best arts on unseen objects: 97.7% vs. 93.5% on Unseen LM, 85.5% vs. 76.3% on Unseen O-LM, showing the strong generalizability of our method. On the large-scale BOP benchmark, our method also provides measurable gains, with an average recall of 58.3 compared to 57.9 previously. In addition, CAA reduces computational cost by 1.3-1.5 compared to the CWA variant while maintaining comparable accuracy. Furthermore, CAA reaches real-time performance, achieving over 68 FPS and offering a substantially improved accuracy-efficiency trade-off.