Lidar-based Multiple Object Tracking with Occlusion Handling

Occlusion remains an issue in multiple object tracking, which could cause ambiguity in object detection, such as incorrect or missing detection. Under occlusion, a track could experience an early termination, resulting in identity switches and/or fragmentation. To recover from different lengths of occlusions, the track should be maintained by considering its occlusion status. To address the issues mentioned above, we propose an indicator that can model the track's occlusion extent via geometric information provided by LiDAR data. Through incorporating the indicator into the track management and data association process, it is feasible to prevent tracks from premature termination. The proposed method is evaluated on the collected dataset which undergoes frequent and severe occlusions. Compared to the state-of-the-art probabilistic tracking approach, our approach achieves improvements of 3.26% in MOTA and 5.36% in IDF1. Additionally, we obtain 9.89% improvements in IDF1 specifically for objects experiencing severe occlusions.