Ellipse Regression with Predicted Uncertainties for Accurate Multi-View 3D Object Estimation

Abstract: Convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures, such as Mask R-CNN, constitute the state of the art in object detection and segmentation. Recently, these methods have been extended for model-based segmentation where the network outputs the parameters of a geometric model (e.g. an ellipse) directly. This work considers objects whose three-dimensional models can be represented as ellipsoids. We present a variant of Mask R-CNN for estimating the parameters of ellipsoidal objects by segmenting each object and accurately regressing the parameters of projection ellipses. We show that model regression is sensitive to the underlying occlusion scenario and that prediction quality for each object needs to be characterized individually for accurate 3D object estimation. We present a novel ellipse regression loss which can learn the offset parameters with their uncertainties and quantify the overall geometric quality of detection for each ellipse. These values, in turn, allow us to fuse multi-view detections to obtain 3D ellipsoid parameters in a principled fashion. The experiments on both synthetic and real datasets quantitatively demonstrate the high accuracy of our proposed method in estimating 3D objects under heavy occlusions compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.