  This paper presents KeypointNet, an end-to-end geometric reasoning framework
to learn an optimal set of category-specific 3D keypoints, along with their
detectors. Given a single image, KeypointNet extracts 3D keypoints that are
optimized for a downstream task. We demonstrate this framework on 3D pose
estimation by proposing a differentiable objective that seeks the optimal set
of keypoints for recovering the relative pose between two views of an object.
Our model discovers geometrically and semantically consistent keypoints across
viewing angles and instances of an object category. Importantly, we find that
our end-to-end framework using no ground-truth keypoint annotations outperforms
a fully supervised baseline using the same neural network architecture on the
task of pose estimation. The discovered 3D keypoints on the car, chair, and
plane categories of ShapeNet are visualized at http://keypointnet.github.io/.
