Efficient tracking of closely spaced objects in depth data using sequential dirichlet process clustering

Many approaches for tracking objects in lidar data have been proposed in recent years. However, most practical real time systems assume that clean segmentation of lidar points into individual objects can be achieved. Unfortunately, efficient lidar segmentation approaches are prone to under-segmentation when objects are very close to each other; one solution is to introduce additional segmentation steps into the tracking process. In this paper we propose a new method to address this task with distance dependent Chinese Restaurant Processes (dd-CRP) equipped with a shape prior defining possible object shapes. By adding constraints to the segmentation model, we are able to further improve stability of segmentation and tracking. Experiments on real datasets show the advantage of this approach over a baseline object tracking pipeline.