# Prior-free relative 6D pose estimation of multiple object instances

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08949/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2026.

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

- [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)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [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)
- [OnePose: One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12257/) (2022)
- [Gen6D: Generalizable Model-Free 6-DoF Object Pose Estimation from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10776/) (2022)
- [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)
- [LatentFusion: End-to-End Differentiable Reconstruction and Rendering for Unseen Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00416/) (2019)
- [Recovering 6D Object Pose and Predicting Next-Best-View in the Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.07506/) (2015)
- [FreeZe: Training-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation with geometric and vision foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00947/) (2023)
- [NOPE: Novel Object Pose Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13612/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11537/) (2024)
- [Multi-Image Matching via Fast Alternating Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04845/) (2015)
- [POPE: 6-DoF Promptable Pose Estimation of Any Object, in Any Scene, with One Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15727/) (2023)
- [Open-vocabulary object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00690/) (2023)
- [Large-scale 6D Object Pose Estimation Dataset for Industrial Bin-Picking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12125/) (2019)
- [Higher-order Projected Power Iterations for Scalable Multi-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10541/) (2018)
- [ZeroPose: CAD-Prompted Zero-shot Object 6D Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17934/) (2023)
- [One2Any: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation for Any Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04109/) (2025)
- [Accurate and efficient zero-shot 6D pose estimation with frozen foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09784/) (2025)
- [High-resolution open-vocabulary object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16384/) (2024)
- [ConceptPose: Training-Free Zero-Shot Object Pose Estimation using Concept Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09056/) (2025)
- [Distilling 3D distinctive local descriptors for 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15106/) (2025)
- [ZeroBP: Learning Position-Aware Correspondence for Zero-shot 6D Pose Estimation in Bin-Picking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01004/) (2025)
- [CHIP: A multi-sensor dataset for 6D pose estimation of chairs in industrial settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09699/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object 6D pose estimation formulations have progressively reduced reliance on object-specific priors, evolving from explicit 3D models to multi-view object captures to single reference images. We take this progression to its extreme by introducing prior-free relative 6D pose estimation, which lifts the assumption of knowing which object is to be posed within the scene. This novel setting aims to estimate the relative poses of multiple instances of an unknown object within the same image, without requiring CAD models, templates, or reference images. We solve this by formulating a novel method (PROSE) that finds coarse correspondences between object instances using multimodal foundation features, thus requiring no training. We refine these correspondences by imposing cycle consistency across tuples of instances, and leverage the resulting globally consistent correspondences to estimate the relative 6D pose between any pair of instances. To enable systematic evaluation, we design a novel benchmark (PRENCH) built from three multi-instance BOP datasets and enriched with task-specific metadata. PROSE consistently outperforms baselines obtained by adapting state-of-the-art single-image methods to the proposed setting, while requiring neither task-specific supervision nor additional learned components. Project website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/PROSE/