PTMOT: A Probabilistic Multiple Object Tracker Enhanced by Tracklet Confidence for Autonomous Driving

Real driving scenarios, due to occlusions and disturbances, provide disordered and noisy measurements, which makes the task of multi-object tracking quite challenging. Conventional approach is to find deterministic data association; however, it has unstable performance in high clutter density. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic tracklet-enhanced multiple object tracker (PTMOT), which integrates Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) filter with confidence of tracklets. The proposed method is able to realize efficient and robust probabilistic association for 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and improve the PMBM filter’s continuity by smoothing single target hypothesis with global hypothesis. It consists of two key parts. First, the PMBM tracker based on sets of tracklets is implemented to realize probabilistic fusion of disordered measurements. Second, the confidence of tracklets is smoothed through a smoothing-while-filtering approach. Extensive MOT tests on nuScenes tracking dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in different modalities.