  Detecting poorly textured objects and estimating their 3D pose reliably is
still a very challenging problem. We introduce a simple but powerful approach
to computing descriptors for object views that efficiently capture both the
object identity and 3D pose. By contrast with previous manifold-based
approaches, we can rely on the Euclidean distance to evaluate the similarity
between descriptors, and therefore use scalable Nearest Neighbor search methods
to efficiently handle a large number of objects under a large range of poses.
To achieve this, we train a Convolutional Neural Network to compute these
descriptors by enforcing simple similarity and dissimilarity constraints
between the descriptors. We show that our constraints nicely untangle the
images from different objects and different views into clusters that are not
only well-separated but also structured as the corresponding sets of poses: The
Euclidean distance between descriptors is large when the descriptors are from
different objects, and directly related to the distance between the poses when
the descriptors are from the same object. These important properties allow us
to outperform state-of-the-art object views representations on challenging RGB
and RGB-D data.
