  3D pose estimation is a key component of many important computer vision tasks
such as autonomous navigation and 3D scene understanding. Most state-of-the-art
approaches to 3D pose estimation solve this problem as a pose-classification
problem in which the pose space is discretized into bins and a CNN classifier
is used to predict a pose bin. We argue that the 3D pose space is continuous
and propose to solve the pose estimation problem in a CNN regression framework
with a suitable representation, data augmentation and loss function that
captures the geometry of the pose space. Experiments on PASCAL3D+ show that the
proposed 3D pose regression approach achieves competitive performance compared
to the state-of-the-art.
