  Current CNN-based algorithms for recovering the 3D pose of an object in an
image assume knowledge about both the object category and its 2D localization
in the image. In this paper, we relax one of these constraints and propose to
solve the task of joint object category and 3D pose estimation from an image
assuming known 2D localization. We design a new architecture for this task
composed of a feature network that is shared between subtasks, an object
categorization network built on top of the feature network, and a collection of
category dependent pose regression networks. We also introduce suitable loss
functions and a training method for the new architecture. Experiments on the
challenging PASCAL3D+ dataset show state-of-the-art performance in the joint
categorization and pose estimation task. Moreover, our performance on the joint
task is comparable to the performance of state-of-the-art methods on the
simpler 3D pose estimation with known object category task.
