$$360^{\circ }$$ 360 ∘ real-time and power-efficient 3D DAMOT for autonomous driving applications

Autonomous Driving (AD) promises an efficient, comfortable and safe driving experience. Nevertheless, fatalities involving vehicles equipped with Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) are on the rise, especially those related to the perception module of the vehicle. This paper presents a real-time and power-efficient 3D Multi-Object Detection and Tracking (DAMOT) method proposed for Intelligent Vehicles (IV) applications, allowing the vehicle to track $$360^{\circ }$$ 360 ∘ surrounding objects as a preliminary stage to perform trajectory forecasting to prevent collisions and anticipate the ego-vehicle to future traffic scenarios. First, we present our DAMOT pipeline based on Fast Encoders for object detection and a combination of a 3D Kalman Filter and Hungarian Algorithm, used for state estimation and data association respectively. We extend our previous work ellaborating a preliminary version of sensor fusion based DAMOT, merging the extracted features by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using camera information for long-term re-identification and obstacles retrieved by the 3D object detector. Both pipelines exploit the concepts of lightweight Linux containers using the Docker approach to provide the system with isolation, flexibility and portability, and standard communication in robotics using the Robot Operating System (ROS). Second, both pipelines are validated using the recently proposed KITTI-3DMOT evaluation tool that demonstrates the full strength of 3D localization and tracking of a MOT system. Finally, the most efficient architecture is validated in some interesting traffic scenarios implemented in the CARLA (Car Learning to Act) open-source driving simulator and in our real-world autonomous electric car using the NVIDIA AGX Xavier, an AI embedded system for autonomous machines, studying its performance in a controlled but realistic urban environment with real-time execution (results).