Joint 3D Object Detection and Tracking Using Spatio-Temporal Representation of Camera Image and LiDAR Point Clouds

In this paper, we propose a new joint object detection and tracking (JoDT) framework for 3D object detection and tracking based on camera and LiDAR sensors. The proposed method, referred to as 3D DetecTrack, enables the detector and tracker to cooperate to generate a spatio-temporal representation of the camera and LiDAR data, with which 3D object detection and tracking are then performed. The detector constructs the spatio-temporal features via the weighted temporal aggregation of the spatial features obtained by the camera and LiDAR fusion. Then, the detector reconfigures the initial detection results using information from the tracklets maintained up to the previous time step. Based on the spatio-temporal features generated by the detector, the tracker associates the detected objects with previously tracked objects using a graph neural network (GNN). We devise a fully-connected GNN facilitated by a combination of rule-based edge pruning and attention-based edge gating, which exploits both spatial and temporal object contexts to improve tracking performance. The experiments conducted on both KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed 3D DetecTrack achieves significant improvements in both detection and tracking performances over baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing methods through collaboration between the detector and tracker.