Person Detection and Tracking from an Overhead Crane LiDAR

TL;DR

This paper presents a new dataset and adapted detection methods for person detection and tracking using overhead LiDAR on an industrial crane, demonstrating high accuracy and real-time performance.

Contribution

It introduces a curated overhead LiDAR dataset with annotations and adapts 3D detectors for this domain, bridging the gap between driving datasets and overhead sensing.

Findings

Detection AP up to 0.84 at 5m radius

VoxelNeXt and SECOND are most reliable backbones

Real-time detection feasible with low latency

Abstract

This paper investigates person detection and tracking in an industrial indoor workspace using a LiDAR mounted on an overhead crane. The overhead viewpoint introduces a strong domain shift from common vehicle-centric LiDAR benchmarks, and limited availability of suitable public training data. Henceforth, we curate a site-specific overhead LiDAR dataset with 3D human bounding-box annotations and adapt selected candidate 3D detectors under a unified training and evaluation protocol. We further integrate lightweight tracking-by-detection using AB3DMOT and SimpleTrack to maintain person identities over time. Detection performance is reported with distance-sliced evaluation to quantify the practical operating envelope of the sensing setup. The best adapted detector configurations achieve average precision (AP) up to 0.84 within a 5.0 m horizontal radius, increasing to 0.97 at 1.0 m, with VoxelNeXt and SECOND emerging as the most reliable backbones across this range. The acquired results contribute in bridging the domain gap between standard driving datasets and overhead sensing for person detection and tracking. We also report latency measurements, highlighting practical real-time feasibility. Finally, we release our dataset and implementations in GitHub to support further research