6-DOF Model Based Tracking via Object Coordinate Regression

This work investigates the problem of 6-Degrees-Of-Freedom (6-DOF) object tracking from RGB-D images, where the object is rigid and a 3D model of the object is known. As in many previous works, we utilize a Particle Filter (PF) framework. In order to have a fast tracker, the key aspect is to design a clever proposal distribution which works reliably even with a small number of particles. To achieve this we build on a recently developed state-of-the-art system for single image 6D pose estimation of known 3D objects, using the concept of so-called 3D object coordinates. The idea is to train a random forest that regresses the 3D object coordinates from the RGB-D image. Our key technical contribution is a two-way procedure to integrate the random forest predictions in the proposal distribution generation. This has many practical advantages, in particular better generalization ability with respect to occlusions, changes in lighting and fast-moving objects. We demonstrate experimentally that we exceed state-of-the-art on a given, public dataset. To raise the bar in terms of fast-moving objects and object occlusions, we also create a new dataset, which will be made publicly available.