Estimating 6D aircraft pose from keypoints and structures

This article addresses the challenge of 6D aircraft pose estimation from a single RGB image during the flight. Many recent works have shown that keypoints-based approaches, which first detect keypoints and then estimate the 6D pose, achieve remarkable performance. However, it is hard to locate the keypoints precisely in complex weather scenes. In this article, we propose a novel approach, called Pose Estimation with Keypoints and Structures (PEKS), which leverages multiple intermediate representations to estimate the 6D pose. Unlike previous works, our approach simultaneously locates keypoints and structures to recover the pose parameter of aircraft through a Perspective-n-Point Structure (PnPS) algorithm. These representations integrate the local geometric information of the object and the topological relationship between components of the target, which effectively improve the accuracy and robustness of 6D pose estimation. In addition, we contribute a dataset for aircraft pose estimation which consists of 3681 real images and 216,000 rendered images. Extensive experiments on our own aircraft pose dataset and multiple open-access pose datasets (e.g., ObjectNet3D, LineMOD) demonstrate that our proposed method can accurately estimate 6D aircraft pose in various complex weather scenes while achieving the comparative performance with the state-of-the-art pose estimation methods.