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 CarloneAbstract:
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.
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} }