6D object pose estimation has shown strong generalizability to novel objects. However, existing methods often require either a complete, well-reconstructed 3D model or numerous reference images that fully cover the object. Estimating 6D poses from partial references, which capture only fragments of an object’s appearance and geometry, remains challenging. To address this, we propose UA-Pose, an uncertainty-aware approach for 6D object pose estimation and online object completion specifically designed for partial references. We assume access to either (1) a limited set of RGBD images with known poses or (2) a single 2D image. For the first case, we initialize a partial object 3D model based on the provided images and poses, while for the second, we use image-to-3D techniques to generate an initial object 3D model. Our method integrates uncertainty into the incomplete 3D model, distinguishing between seen and unseen regions. This uncertainty enables confidence assessment in pose estimation and guides an uncertainty-aware sampling strategy for online object completion, enhancing robustness in pose estimation accuracy and improving object completeness. We evaluate our method on the YCB-Video, YCBInEOAT, and HO3D datasets, including RGBD sequences of YCB objects manipulated by robots and human hands. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing methods, particularly when object observations are incomplete or partially captured. Project page: https://minfenli.github.io/UA-Pose/

3D object generation from a single unposed RGB image is essential for robotic perception, as reconstructing complete geometry and texture is essential for precise manipulation, grasping, and scene understanding, which is key for autonomous navigation and dexterous interaction. Recent advancements in image-to-3D employ Gaussian Splatting with pre-trained 2D or 3D diffusion models, but a disparity exists: 2D models generate high-fidelity textures yet lack geometric consistency, while 3D models ensure structural coherence but produce overly smooth textures. To address this, we introduce a two-stage frequency-based distillation loss integrated with Gaussian Splatting, leveraging geometric priors from a 3D diffusion model’s low-frequency spectrum for structural consistency and a 2D diffusion model’s high-frequency details for sharper textures. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction quality, significantly improving robotic perception pipelines. Additionally, we demonstrate the easy adaptability of our method for highly accurate object pose estimation and tracking, which is critical for precise robotic grasping, manipulation, and scene understanding. Additional results can be found in the supplementary file.

We investigate the use of Deep Neural Networks for the classification of image datasets where texture features are important for generating class-conditional discriminative representations. To this end, we first derive the size of the feature space for some standard textural features extracted from the input dataset and then use the theory of Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension to show that hand-crafted feature extraction creates low-dimensional representations which help in reducing the overall excess error rate. As a corollary to this analysis, we derive for the first time upper bounds on the VC dimension of Convolutional Neural Network as well as Dropout and Dropconnect networks and the relation between excess error rate of Dropout and Dropconnect networks. The concept of intrinsic dimension is used to validate the intuition that texture-based datasets are inherently higher dimensional as compared to handwritten digits or other object recognition datasets and hence more difficult to be shattered by neural networks. We then derive the mean distance from the centroid to the nearest and farthest sampling points in an n-dimensional manifold and show that the Relative Contrast of the sample data vanishes as dimensionality of the underlying vector space tends to infinity.