  We address the task of 6D pose estimation of known rigid objects from single
input images in scenarios where the objects are partly occluded. Recent
RGB-D-based methods are robust to moderate degrees of occlusion. For RGB
inputs, no previous method works well for partly occluded objects. Our main
contribution is to present the first deep learning-based system that estimates
accurate poses for partly occluded objects from RGB-D and RGB input. We achieve
this with a new instance-aware pipeline that decomposes 6D object pose
estimation into a sequence of simpler steps, where each step removes specific
aspects of the problem. The first step localizes all known objects in the image
using an instance segmentation network, and hence eliminates surrounding
clutter and occluders. The second step densely maps pixels to 3D object surface
positions, so called object coordinates, using an encoder-decoder network, and
hence eliminates object appearance. The third, and final, step predicts the 6D
pose using geometric optimization. We demonstrate that we significantly
outperform the state-of-the-art for pose estimation of partly occluded objects
for both RGB and RGB-D input.
