  Light has many properties that vision sensors can passively measure.
Colour-band separated wavelength and intensity are arguably the most commonly
used for monocular 6D object pose estimation. This paper explores how
complementary polarisation information, i.e. the orientation of light wave
oscillations, influences the accuracy of pose predictions. A hybrid model that
leverages physical priors jointly with a data-driven learning strategy is
designed and carefully tested on objects with different levels of photometric
complexity. Our design significantly improves the pose accuracy compared to
state-of-the-art photometric approaches and enables object pose estimation for
highly reflective and transparent objects. A new multi-modal instance-level 6D
object pose dataset with highly accurate pose annotations for multiple objects
with varying photometric complexity is introduced as a benchmark.
