Fully-supervised category-level pose estimation aims to determine the 6-DoF poses of unseen instances from known categories, requiring expensive manual labeling costs. Recently, various self-supervised category-level pose estimation methods have been proposed to reduce the requirement of the annotated datasets. However, most methods rely on synthetic data or 3D CAD model, and they are typically limited to addressing single-object pose problems without considering multi-objective tasks or shape reconstruction. To overcome these challenges and limitations, we introduce a diffusion-driven self-supervised network for multi-object shape reconstruction and categorical pose estimation, only leveraging the shape priors. Specifically, to capture the SE(3)-equivariant pose features and 3D scale-invariant shape information, we present a Prior-Aware Pyramid 3D Point Transformer. This module adopts a point convolutional layer with radial-kernels for pose-aware learning and a 3D scale-invariant graph convolution layer for object-level shape representation. Furthermore, we introduce a Pretrain-to-Refine Self-Supervised Training Paradigm to train our network. It enables proposed network to capture the associations between shape priors and observations, addressing the challenge of intra-class shape variations by utilising the diffusion mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets and a self-built dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised category-level baselines and even surpasses some fully-supervised instance-level and category-level methods. The project page is released at Self-SRPE.

The edge detection technique is an essential step for aircraft skin milling in aviation manufacturing. Most of the current detection methods focus on traditionally defined edge extraction tasks but disregard the crucial systematic requirement of edge milling. In this article, we proposed a novel edge detection framework for automatic edge milling of aircraft skins. First, an edge probability detector is proposed by the spatial tangent continuity to provide the essential reference. Second, we propose a hierarchical branch searching method to hierarchically strip the desired milling edges from the raw point cloud, which consists of the following three graded progressive steps: branch backbone generation, branch extension, and branch pruning. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on both synthetic models and aircraft skin workpieces. The proposed method outperforms the other baselines and shows accurate edges for the edge milling task.