HRPose: Real-Time High-Resolution 6D Pose Estimation Network Using Knowledge Distillation

Real-time six degrees-of-freedom (6D) object pose estimation is essential for many real-world applications, such as robotic grasping and augmented reality. To achieve an accurate object pose estimation from RGB images in real-time, we propose an effective and lightweight model, namely high-resolution 6D pose estimation network (HRPose). We adopt the efficient and small HRNetV2-W18 as a feature extractor to reduce computational burdens while generating accurate 6D poses. With only 33% of the model size and lower computational costs, our HRPose achieves comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art models. Moreover, by transferring knowledge from a large model to our proposed HRPose through output and feature-similarity distillations, the performance of our HRPose is improved in effectiveness and efficiency. Numerical experiments on the widely-used benchmark LINEMOD demonstrate the superiority of our proposed HRPose against state-of-the-art methods.