A Baseline for 3D Multi-Object Tracking

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is an essential component technology for many real-time applications such as autonomous driving or assistive robotics. Recent work on 3D MOT tend to focus more on developing accurate systems giving less regard to computational cost and system complexity. In contrast, this work proposes a simple yet accurate real-time 3D MOT system. We use an off-the-shelf 3D object detector to obtain oriented 3D bounding boxes from the LiDAR point cloud. Then, a combination of 3D Kalman filter and Hungarian algorithm is used for state estimation and data association. Although our baseline system is a straightforward combination of standard methods, we obtain the state-of-the-art results. To evaluate our baseline system, we propose a new 3D MOT extension to the official KITTI 2D MOT evaluation along with a set of new metrics. Our proposed baseline method for 3D MOT establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 3D MOT for KITTI. Surprisingly, although our baseline system does not use any 2D data as input, we place 2nd on the official KITTI 2D MOT leaderboard. Also, our proposed 3D MOT method runs at a rate of $214.7$ FPS, achieving the fastest speed among all modern MOT systems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/xinshuoweng/AB3DMOT