Title: Improving 6D Pose Estimation of Objects in Clutter via Physics-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search,
Abstract: This work proposes a process for efficiently searching over combinations of
individual object 6D pose hypotheses in cluttered scenes, especially in cases
involving occlusions and objects resting on each other. The initial set of
candidate object poses is generated from state-of-the-art object detection and
global point cloud registration techniques. The best-scored pose per object by
using these techniques may not be accurate due to overlaps and occlusions.
Nevertheless, experimental indications provided in this work show that object
poses with lower ranks may be closer to the real poses than ones with high
ranks according to registration techniques. This motivates a global
optimization process for improving these poses by taking into account
scene-level physical interactions between objects. It also implies that the
Cartesian product of candidate poses for interacting objects must be searched
so as to identify the best scene-level hypothesis. To perform the search
efficiently, the candidate poses for each object are clustered so as to reduce
their number but still keep a sufficient diversity. Then, searching over the
combinations of candidate object poses is performed through a Monte Carlo Tree
Search (MCTS) process that uses the similarity between the observed depth image
of the scene and a rendering of the scene given the hypothesized pose as a
score that guides the search procedure. MCTS handles in a principled way the
tradeoff between fine-tuning the most promising poses and exploring new ones,
by using the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) technique. Experimental results
indicate that this process is able to quickly identify in cluttered scenes
physically-consistent object poses that are significantly closer to ground
truth compared to poses found by point cloud registration methods.