Learning the Incremental Warp for 3D Vehicle Tracking in LiDAR Point Clouds

Abstract

Object tracking from LiDAR point clouds, which are always incomplete, sparse, and unstructured, plays a crucial role in urban navigation. Some existing methods utilize a learned similarity network for locating the target, immensely limiting the advancements in tracking accuracy. In this study, we leveraged a powerful target discriminator and an accurate state estimator to robustly track target objects in challenging point cloud scenarios. Considering the complex nature of estimating the state, we extended the traditional Lucas and Kanade (LK) algorithm to 3D point cloud tracking. Specifically, we propose a state estimation subnetwork that aims to learn the incremental warp for updating the coarse target state. Moreover, to obtain a coarse state, we present a simple yet efficient discrimination subnetwork. It can project 3D shapes into a more discriminatory latent space by integrating the global feature into each point-wise feature. Experiments on KITTI and PandaSet datasets showed that compared with the most advanced of other methods, our proposed method can achieve significant improvements—in particular, up to 13.68% on KITTI.