Collaborative Multi-Object Tracking With Conformal Uncertainty Propagation

Sanbao Su, Songyang Han, Yiming Li, Zhili Zhang, Chen Feng, Caiwen Ding, Fei Miao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Object detection and multiple object tracking (MOT) are essential components of self-driving systems. Accurate detection and uncertainty quantification are both critical for onboard modules, such as perception, prediction, and planning, to improve the safety and robustness of autonomous vehicles. Collaborative object detection (COD) has been proposed to improve detection accuracy and reduce uncertainty by leveraging the viewpoints of multiple agents. However, little attention has been paid to how to leverage the uncertainty quantification from COD to enhance MOT performance. In this letter, as the first attempt to address this challenge, we design an uncertainty propagation framework called MOT-CUP. Our framework first quantifies the uncertainty of COD through direct modeling and conformal prediction, and propagates this uncertainty information into the motion prediction and association steps. MOT-CUP is designed to work with different collaborative object detectors and baseline MOT algorithms. We evaluate MOT-CUP on V2X-Sim, a comprehensive collaborative perception dataset, and demonstrate a 2% improvement in accuracy and a 2.67× reduction in uncertainty compared to the baselines, e.g. SORT and ByteTrack. In scenarios characterized by high occlusion levels, our MOT-CUP demonstrates a noteworthy 4.01% improvement in accuracy. MOT-CUP demonstrates the importance of uncertainty quantification in both COD and MOT, and provides the first attempt to improve the accuracy and reduce the uncertainty in MOT based on COD through uncertainty propagation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3323-3330
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume9
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1 2024

Keywords

  • Computer vision for transportation
  • deep learning for visual perception
  • multi-robot systems
  • visual tracking

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Optimization
  • Artificial Intelligence

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