Quality Matters: Embracing Quality Clues for Robust 3D Multi-Object Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quality-aware object association strategy for 3D multi-object tracking that adaptively leverages attribute quality estimations, significantly improving robustness and outperforming state-of-the-art methods on nuScenes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel quality estimation and adaptive association framework that effectively addresses noise-related challenges in 3D MOT.

Findings

Boosts tracking performance by 2.2% AMOTA

Outperforms all existing state-of-the-art on nuScenes

Reduces gap between camera and LiDAR trackers

Abstract

3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has achieved tremendous achievement thanks to the rapid development of 3D object detection and 2D MOT. Recent advanced works generally employ a series of object attributes, e.g., position, size, velocity, and appearance, to provide the clues for the association in 3D MOT. However, these cues may not be reliable due to some visual noise, such as occlusion and blur, leading to tracking performance bottleneck. To reveal the dilemma, we conduct extensive empirical analysis to expose the key bottleneck of each clue and how they correlate with each other. The analysis results motivate us to efficiently absorb the merits among all cues, and adaptively produce an optimal tacking manner. Specifically, we present Location and Velocity Quality Learning, which efficiently guides the network to estimate the quality of predicted object attributes. Based on these quality estimations, we propose a quality-aware object association (QOA) strategy to leverage the quality score as an important reference factor for achieving robust association. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments indicate that the proposed strategy significantly boosts tracking performance by 2.2% AMOTA and our method outperforms all existing state-of-the-art works on nuScenes by a large margin. Moreover, QTrack achieves 48.0% and 51.1% AMOTA tracking performance on the nuScenes validation and test sets, which significantly reduces the performance gap between pure camera and LiDAR based trackers.