Canonical Shape Reconstruction With SE(3) Equivariance Learning for Weakly-Supervised Object Pose Estimation

6D object pose estimation from a single RGB-D image is a fundamental problem in computer vision and robot manipulation. Despite recent advancements, existing methods still suffer several limitations. First of all, the object shape representation extracted from the depth map is often less expressive because the object point cloud parsed from the depth map is highly incomplete due to the object self-occlusion and noisy due to the sensor artifacts. This shape representation issue further intensifies when lacking sufficient labeled data for model training, which unfortunately is another typical problem for object pose estimation considering the heavy annotation cost for real-world pose labeling. In this study, we propose to tackle the above issues in a unified way. First, we enhance the object shape representation from the partial point cloud with a novel canonical shape reconstruction module, in which an implicit canonical frame is established by incorporating the SE(3) equivariance, achieving implicit feature alignment of the partial point cloud inputs, leading to robust shape recovery. Second, based on the enhanced object representation, we further utilize the de-canonicalized and pose-dependent completed object shape as the training signal, and develop a novel weakly-supervised learning framework to leverage both labeled synthetic data and unlabeled real data to train the pose estimation model in a label-efficient way. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness, and superiority of our framework over state-of-the-art methods.