RobMOT: Robust 3D Multi-Object Tracking by Observational Noise and State Estimation Drift Mitigation on LiDAR PointCloud

TL;DR

RobMOT introduces a novel multi-stage gating and validity mechanism that significantly improves 3D multi-object tracking accuracy and robustness in LiDAR point clouds, especially for distant and occluded objects, while maintaining real-time performance.

Contribution

The paper presents RobMOT, a new online framework that reduces false positives and state estimation drift in 3D tracking by innovative gating and validity strategies, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

29.47% MOTA improvement on KITTI validation dataset

4.8% higher HOTA score with refined Kalman filter

Operates at 3221 FPS on a single CPU

Abstract

This paper addresses limitations in 3D tracking-by-detection methods, particularly in identifying legitimate trajectories and reducing state estimation drift in Kalman filters. Existing methods often use threshold-based filtering for detection scores, which can fail for distant and occluded objects, leading to false positives. To tackle this, we propose a novel track validity mechanism and multi-stage observational gating process, significantly reducing ghost tracks and enhancing tracking performance. Our method achieves a $29.47\%$ improvement in Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) on the KITTI validation dataset with the Second detector. Additionally, a refined Kalman filter term reduces localization noise, improving higher-order tracking accuracy (HOTA) by $4.8\%$. The online framework, RobMOT, outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple detectors, with HOTA improvements of up to $3.92\%$ on the KITTI testing dataset and $8.7\%$ on the validation dataset, while achieving low identity switch scores. RobMOT excels in challenging scenarios, tracking distant objects and prolonged occlusions, with a $1.77\%$ MOTA improvement on the Waymo Open dataset, and operates at a remarkable 3221 FPS on a single CPU, proving its efficiency for real-time multi-object tracking.