Real-time scalable 6DOF pose estimation for textureless objects

Real-time recognition of the 6DOF pose of textureless objects is a fundamental and challenging problem in robotics. We present a novel approach to perform real-time estimation of the viewpoint, scale, and translation of an object in RGB and RGB-D image captures. In this work, we use a 3D model to render example poses of a textureless object, and find the nearest match to the input image using a GPU implementation. To achieve invariance to illumination and appearance across an object, we transform images to the Laplacian of Gaussian space. To perform real-time matching, we introduce a novel reshaping of the template set and the image, and we restructure the traditional normalized cross-correlation operation to leverage the GPU for fast matrix-matrix multiplication. We provide further speed up of large-scale template matching by contributing a dimensionality reduction approach using principal component analysis, and a candidate elimination method. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance as shown by qualitative results and quantitative comparisons to pre-existing methods.