PTT: Point-Trajectory Transformer for Efficient Temporal 3D Object Detection
Authors: Kuan-Chih Huang, Weijie Lyu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai

Recent temporal LiDAR-based 3D object detectors achieve promising performance based on the two-stage proposal-based approach. They generate 3D box candidates from the first-stage dense detector followed by different temporal aggregation methods. However these approaches require per-frame objects or whole point clouds posing challenges related to memory bank utilization. Moreover point clouds and trajectory features are combined solely based on concatenation which may neglect effective interactions between them. In this paper we propose a point-trajectory transformer with long short-term memory for efficient temporal 3D object detection. To this end we only utilize point clouds of current-frame objects and their historical trajectories as input to minimize the memory bank storage requirement. Furthermore we introduce modules to encode trajectory features focusing on long short-term and future-aware perspectives and then effectively aggregate them with point cloud features. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo dataset to demonstrate that our approach performs well against state-of-the-art methods. The source codes and trained models will be made publicly available. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/PTT.