  Point pair features are a popular representation for free form 3D object
detection and pose estimation. In this paper, their performance in an
industrial random bin picking context is investigated. A new method to generate
representative synthetic datasets is proposed. This allows to investigate the
influence of a high degree of clutter and the presence of self similar
features, which are typical to our application. We provide an overview of
solutions proposed in literature and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. A
simple heuristic method to drastically reduce the computational complexity is
introduced, which results in improved robustness, speed and accuracy compared
to the naive approach.
