SparsePose: Sparse-View Camera Pose Regression and Refinement

Camera pose estimation is a key step in standard 3D reconstruction pipelines that operates on a dense set of images of a single object or scene. However, methods for pose estimation often fail when there are only a few images available because they rely on the ability to robustly identify and match visual features between pairs of images. While these methods can work robustly with dense camera views, capturing a large set of images can be time consuming or impractical. Here, we propose Sparse-View Camera Pose Regression and Refinement (SparsePose) for recovering accurate camera poses given a sparse set of wide-baseline images (fewer than 10). The method learns to regress initial camera poses and then iteratively refine them after training on a large-scale dataset of objects (Co3D: Common Objects in 3D). SparsePose significantly outperforms conventional and learning-based baselines in recovering accurate camera rotations and translations. We also demonstrate our pipeline for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction using only 5-9 images of an object.