Seeing through the Occluders: Robust Monocular 6-DOF Object Pose Tracking via Model-Guided Video Object Segmentation

To deal with occlusion is one of the most challenging problems for monocular 6-DOF object pose tracking. In this letter, we propose a novel 6-DOF object pose tracking method which is robust to heavy occlusions. When the tracked object is occluded by another object, instead of trying to detect the occluder, we seek to see through it, as if the occluder doesnt exist. To this end, we propose to combine a learning-based video object segmentation module with an optimization-based pose estimation module in a closed loop. Firstly, a model-guided video object segmentation network is utilized to predict the accurate and full mask of the object (including the occluded part). Secondly, a non-linear 6-DOF pose optimization method is performed with the guidance of the predicted full mask. After solving the current object pose, we render the 3D object model to obtain a refined, model-constrained mask of the current frame, which is then fed back to the segmentation network for processing the next frame, closing the whole loop. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-arts by a large margin for dealing with heavy occlusions, and could handle extreme cases which previous methods would fail.