# Structure-Aware Correspondence Learning for Relative Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [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)
- [6-DOF GraspNet: Variational Grasp Generation for Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10520/) (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)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)
- [DPOD: 6D Pose Object Detector and Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11020/) (2019)
- [Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01275/) (2019)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (2022)
- [Shape Prior Deformation for Categorical 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08454/) (2020)
- [FFB6D: A Full Flow Bidirectional Fusion Network for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02242/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Object Landmarks through Conditional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07823/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Object Keypoints for Perception and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11883/) (2019)
- [RelPose: Predicting Probabilistic Relative Rotation for Single Objects in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05963/) (2022)
- [RelPose++: Recovering 6D Poses from Sparse-view Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04926/) (2023)
- [You Only Demonstrate Once: Category-Level Manipulation from Single Visual Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12716/) (2022)
- [Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation using Self-Supervised Deep Prior Deformation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05444/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ComPose: A Unified Completion-Pose Framework for Robust Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25553/) (2026)
- [HOT-POT: Optimal Transport for Sparse Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12423/) (2026)
- [PriorPose: Reference-Guided Joint Deformation and Alignment for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16727/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Relative pose estimation provides a promising way for achieving object-agnostic pose estimation. Despite the success of existing 3D correspondence-based methods, the reliance on explicit feature matching suffers from small overlaps in visible regions and unreliable feature estimation for invisible regions. Inspired by humans' ability to assemble two object parts that have small or no overlapping regions by considering object structure, we propose a novel Structure-Aware Correspondence Learning method for Relative Pose Estimation, which consists of two key modules. First, a structure-aware keypoint extraction module is designed to locate a set of kepoints that can represent the structure of objects with different shapes and appearance, under the guidance of a keypoint based image reconstruction loss. Second, a structure-aware correspondence estimation module is designed to model the intra-image and inter-image relationships between keypoints to extract structure-aware features for correspondence estimation. By jointly leveraging these two modules, the proposed method can naturally estimate 3D-3D correspondences for unseen objects without explicit feature matching for precise relative pose estimation. Experimental results on the CO3D, Objaverse and LineMOD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior methods, i.e., with 5.7degreduction in mean angular error on the CO3D dataset.
