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The point pair feature (PPF) is widely used in manufacturing for estimating 6-D poses. The key to the success of PPF matching is to establish correct 3-D correspondences between the object and the scene, i.e., finding as many valid similar point pairs as possible. However, efficient sampling of point pairs has been overlooked in existing frameworks. In this article, we propose a revised PPF matching pipeline to improve the efficiency of 6-D pose estimation. Our basic idea is that the valid scene reference points are lying on the object’s surface and the previously sampled reference points can provide prior information for locating new reference points. The novelty of our approach is a new sampling algorithm for selecting scene reference points based on the multisubpopulation particle swarm optimization guided by a probability map. We also introduce an effective pose clustering and hypotheses verification method to obtain the optimal pose. Moreover, we optimize the progressive sampling for multiframe point clouds to improve processing efficiency. The experimental results show that our method outperforms previous methods by 6.6%, 3.9% in terms of accuracy on the public DTU and LineMOD datasets, respectively. We further validate our approach by applying it in a real robot grasping task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]