Intra-Frame Graph Structure and Inter-Frame Bipartite Graph Matching with ReID-Based Occlusion Resilience for Point Cloud Multi-Object Tracking

Abstract

Three-dimensional multi-object tracking (MOT) using lidar point cloud data is crucial for applications in autonomous driving, smart cities, and robotic navigation. It involves identifying objects in point cloud sequence data and consistently assigning unique identities to them throughout the sequence. Occlusions can lead to missed detections, resulting in incorrect data associations and ID switches. To address these challenges, we propose a novel point cloud multi-object tracker called GBRTracker. Our method integrates an intra-frame graph structure into the backbone to extract and aggregate spatial neighborhood node features, significantly reducing detection misses. We construct an inter-frame bipartite graph for data association and design a sophisticated cost matrix based on the center, box size, velocity, and heading angle. Using a minimum-cost flow algorithm to achieve globally optimal matching, thereby reducing ID switches. For unmatched detections, we design a motion-based re-identification (ReID) feature embedding module, which uses velocity and the heading angle to calculate similarity and association probability, reconnecting them with their corresponding trajectory IDs or initializing new tracks. Our method maintains high accuracy and reliability, significantly reducing ID switches and trajectory fragmentation, even in challenging scenarios. We validate the effectiveness of GBRTracker through comparative and ablation experiments on the NuScenes and Waymo Open Datasets, demonstrating its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.