Pose Tracking with a Foundation Pose Model and an Ensemble Directional Kalman Filter

This paper introduces the ensemble directional Kalman filter (EnDKF), an ensemble-based Kalman filtering approach for pose tracking that jointly estimates an object's position and attitude using ideas from directional statistics. The EnDKF integrates a unit-quaternion attitude representation to move beyond canonical Kalman filter mean and covariance assumptions that poorly capture directional uncertainty. Experiments on a synthetic constant-velocity constant-angular-velocity system and a digital-twin head-tracking scenario using the FoundationPose algorithm demonstrate a significant reduction in error as opposed to merely using measurements.