Reflection-Robust 6DoF Object Tracking with Light Fields

Nikolai Goncharov, Donald G. Dansereau

Tracking the 6DoF pose of a moving rigid object is fundamental to robotics and autonomous driving, but existing trackers assume that object appearance is stable across a sequence, an assumption that breaks down on reflective surfaces whose appearance changes as they mirror the environment. We introduce a light field based reflection-robust 6DoF tracker that turns this apparent nuisance into a pose cue. Per frame, our method recovers depth robustly against reflections, back-projects it into a point cloud, and estimates surface normals. It then decomposes the object's view-dependent appearance into a diffuse albedo and the environment map it reflects, resulting in a relightable surface light field. Starting from a coarse initialization, we relight it by the recovered environment map and optimize the pose on the photometric loss. Because a moving object mirrors new parts of the scene, the environment map fills in as the sequence proceeds, sharpening this signal over time. To evaluate this approach, we introduce a light field tracking dataset re-rendered from a robotic manipulation benchmark at four controlled reflectivity levels, each paired with simulated depth that reproduces how…