Robotics: Science and Systems XIX

A Correct-and-Certify Approach to Self-Supervise Object Pose Estimators via Ensemble Self-Training

Jingnan Shi, Rajat Talak, Dominic Maggio, Luca Carlone

Abstract:

Real-world robotics applications demand object pose estimation methods that work reliably across a variety of scenarios. Modern learning-based approaches require large labeled datasets and tend to perform poorly outside the training domain. Our first contribution is to develop a robust corrector module that corrects pose estimates using depth information, thus enabling existing methods to better generalize to new test domains; the corrector operates on semantic keypoints (but is also applicable to other pose estimators) and is fully differentiable. Our second contribution is an ensemble self-training approach that simultaneously trains multiple pose estimators in a self-supervised manner. Our ensemble self-training architecture uses the robust corrector to refine the output of each pose estimator; then, it evaluates the quality of the outputs using observable correctness certificates; finally, it uses the observably correct outputs for further training, without requiring external supervision. As an additional contribution, we propose small improvements to a regression-based keypoint detection architecture, to enhance its robustness to outliers; these improvements include a robust pooling scheme and a robust centroid computation. Experiments on the YCBV and TLESS datasets show the proposed ensemble self-training performs on par or better than fully supervised baselines while not requiring 3D annotations on real data.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Shi-RSS-23, 
    AUTHOR    = {Jingnan Shi AND Rajat Talak AND Dominic Maggio AND Luca Carlone}, 
    TITLE     = {{A Correct-and-Certify Approach to Self-Supervise Object Pose Estimators via Ensemble Self-Training}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2023}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Daegu, Republic of Korea}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2023.XIX.076} 
}