S.T.A.R.-Track: Latent Motion Models for End-to-End 3D Object Tracking With Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Appearance Representations

Following the tracking-by-attention paradigm, this letter introduces an object-centric, transformer-based framework for tracking in 3D. Traditional model-based tracking approaches incorporate the geometric effect of object- and ego motion between frames with a geometric motion model. Inspired by this, we propose STAR-TRACK, which uses a novel latent motion model (LMM) to additionally adjust object queries to account for changes in viewing direction and lighting conditions directly in the latent space, while still modeling the geometric motion explicitly. Combined with a novel learnable track embedding that aids in modeling the existence probability of tracks, this results in a generic tracking framework that can be integrated with any query-based detector. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate the benefits of our approach, showing state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for DETR3D-based trackers while drastically reducing the number of identity switches of tracks at the same time.