  Estimating the 6D pose of known objects is important for robots to interact
with the real world. The problem is challenging due to the variety of objects
as well as the complexity of a scene caused by clutter and occlusions between
objects. In this work, we introduce PoseCNN, a new Convolutional Neural Network
for 6D object pose estimation. PoseCNN estimates the 3D translation of an
object by localizing its center in the image and predicting its distance from
the camera. The 3D rotation of the object is estimated by regressing to a
quaternion representation. We also introduce a novel loss function that enables
PoseCNN to handle symmetric objects. In addition, we contribute a large scale
video dataset for 6D object pose estimation named the YCB-Video dataset. Our
dataset provides accurate 6D poses of 21 objects from the YCB dataset observed
in 92 videos with 133,827 frames. We conduct extensive experiments on our
YCB-Video dataset and the OccludedLINEMOD dataset to show that PoseCNN is
highly robust to occlusions, can handle symmetric objects, and provide accurate
pose estimation using only color images as input. When using depth data to
further refine the poses, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the
challenging OccludedLINEMOD dataset. Our code and dataset are available at
https://rse-lab.cs.washington.edu/projects/posecnn/.
