Globally Optimal Object Pose Estimation in Point Clouds with Mixed-Integer Programming

Gregory Izatt, Hongkai Dai, Russ Tedrake

Abstract: Motivated by the limitations of local object trackers, we present a formulation of the underlying point-cloud object pose estimation problem as a mixed-integer convex program, which we efficiently solve to optimality with an off-the-shelf branch and bound solver. We show that reasoning about object pose estimation in this way allows natural extension to point-to-mesh correspondence, multiple simultaneous object pose estimation, and outlier rejection without losing the ability to obtain a globally optimal solution. We probe the extent to which rich problem-specific formulations typically tackled with unreliable nonlinear optimization can be rigorously treated in a global optimization framework to overcome the limitations of other global pose estimation methods.