PDQ-Net: Deep Probabilistic Dual Quaternion Network for Absolute Pose Regression on $SE(3)$

WEN JIE LI, Wasif Naeem, Jia Liu, Dequan Zheng, Wei Hao, lijun Chen

Keywords: unit dual quaternion distribution, pose regression, uncertainty, deep learning

TL;DR: A novel deep probabilistic dual quaternion network is proposed for the absolute pose estimation

Abstract: Accurate absolute pose regression is one of the key challenges in robotics and computer vision. Existing direct regression methods suffer from two limitations. First, some noisy scenarios such as poor illumination conditions are likely to result in the uncertainty of pose estimation. Second, the output n-dimensional feature vector in the Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^n$ cannot be well mapped to $SE(3)$ manifold. In this work, we propose a deep dual quaternion network that performs the absolute pose regression on $SE(3)$. We first develop an antipodally symmetric probability distribution over the unit dual quaternion on $SE(3)$ to model uncertainties and then propose an intermediary differential representation space to replace the final output pose, which avoids the mapping problem from $\mathbb{R}^n$ to $SE(3)$. In addition, we introduce a backpropagation method that considers the continuousness and differentiability of the proposed intermediary space. Extensive experiments on the camera re-localization task on the Cambridge Landmarks and 7-Scenes datasets demonstrate that our method greatly improves the accuracy of the pose as well as the robustness in dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity, compared to the state-of-the-art.