360$$^{\circ }$$ Real-Time 3D Multi-object Detection and Tracking for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation

This paper presents a real-time 3D Multi Object Detection and Tracking (DAMOT) method proposed for the UAH autonomous electric car. It allows the vehicle to recognize 360\(^{\circ }\) surrounding objects and uniquely identify them to be able to follow their trajectory in scene by only receiving a 3D point cloud through ROS framework. First, we describe our proposal of 3D object detector, based on PointPillars [11], processing LiDAR data to locate objects in space obtaining their dimensions and location. Secondly, we use BEV-MOT [7], our Multi-Object Tracking technique in order to uniquely identify each object over a Bird’s-Eye View (BEV) through a combination of 2D Kalman filter and Hungarian algorithm, allowing the ego-vehicle to follow surrounding objects trajectories. A comparison of the performance of our proposal with other state-of-the-art methods is carried out applying KITTI-3DMOT evaluation tool extracted from AB3DMOT [21] on KITTI [5] validation dataset. Finally, we validate our DAMOT in several traffic scenarios implemented in CARLA [4] open-source driving simulator by using AB4COGT tool, designed by authors, studying its performance in a controlled but realistic urban environment with real-time execution, providing several demonstration videos (https://cutt.ly/3rU113d).