IST-Net: Prior-free Category-level Pose Estimation with Implicit Space Transformation

Understand

Category-level 6D pose estimation aims to predict the poses and sizes of unseen objects from a specific category.

• Thanks to prior deformation, which explicitly adapts a category-specific 3D prior (i.e., a 3D template) to a given object instance, prior-based methods attained great success and have become a major research stream.
• However, obtaining category-specific priors requires collecting a large amount of 3D models, which is labor-consuming and often not accessible in practice.
• This motivates us to investigate whether priors are necessary to make prior-based methods effective.