Optimization based 3D Multi-Object Tracking using Camera and Radar Data

Robust and reliable online 3D multi-object tracking is an essential component of autonomous driving. Recent research follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm and focuses mainly on lidar sensors, due to their superior range, resolution and depth accuracy compared to other automotive sensors. This simplifies the challenging data association in crowded urban road scenes, resulting in a predominant status of laser based methods. In contrast, we propose an online 3D multi-object tracker based solely on mono camera images and radar data to promote non-lidar based tracking research. By representing all detections of one frame as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), we are able to avoid a fixed data association, which may include wrong assumptions. Instead, we assign the GMM to each tracked object and solve the data association implicitly and jointly by estimating the full 3D object tracks in our factor graph based optimization back end. By including all available information from the object detector, our algorithm achieves accurate, robust and reliable tracking results. We conduct real world experiments on the nuScenes tracking data set improving the state-of-the-art for non-lidar based methods from 17.7% to 34.1 % AMOTA.