# PTT: Point-Track-Transformer Module for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06455/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [Fast and Furious: Real Time End-to-End 3D Detection, Tracking and Motion Forecasting with a Single Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12395/) (2020)
- [Local Relation Networks for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11491/) (2019)
- [A Novel Performance Evaluation Methodology for Single-Target Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01313/) (2015)
- [P2B: Point-to-Box Network for 3D Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13888/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Shape Completion for 3D Siamese Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01784/) (2019)
- [3D-SiamRPN: An End-to-End Learning Method for Real-Time 3D Single Object Tracking Using Raw Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05630/) (2021)
- [Complexer-YOLO: Real-Time 3D Object Detection and Tracking on Semantic Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07537/) (2019)
- [Object Tracking by Reconstruction with View-Specific Discriminative Correlation Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10863/) (2018)
- [F-Siamese Tracker: A Frustum-based Double Siamese Network for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11510/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [PTTR: Relational 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02857/) (2021)
- [Beyond 3D Siamese Tracking: A Motion-Centric Paradigm for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01730/) (2022)
- [3D Siamese Transformer Network for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11995/) (2022)
- [FastPillars: A Deployment-friendly Pillar-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02367/) (2023)
- [CXTrack: Improving 3D Point Cloud Tracking with Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08542/) (2022)
- [Real-time 3D Single Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00860/) (2022)
- [SwiftVLA: Unlocking Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Lightweight VLA Models at Minimal Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00903/) (2025)
- [MBPTrack: Improving 3D Point Cloud Tracking with Memory Networks and Box Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05071/) (2023)
- [A Lightweight and Detector-free 3D Single Object Tracker on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04232/) (2022)
- [GLT-T: Global-Local Transformer Voting for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10927/) (2022)
- [MonoFusion: Sparse-View 4D Reconstruction via Monocular Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23782/) (2025)
- [Exploring Point-BEV Fusion for 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05216/) (2022)
- [OSP2B: One-Stage Point-to-Box Network for 3D Siamese Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11584/) (2023)
- [Synchronize Feature Extracting and Matching: A Single Branch Framework for 3D Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12549/) (2023)
- [Exploiting More Information in Sparse Point Cloud for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00519/) (2022)
- [An Effective Motion-Centric Paradigm for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12535/) (2023)
- [Information Entropy Guided Height-aware Histogram for Quantization-friendly Pillar Feature Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18734/) (2024)
- [Towards Category Unification of 3D Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11204/) (2024)
- [Correlation Pyramid Network for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09195/) (2023)
- [STTracker: Spatio-Temporal Tracker for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17440/) (2023)
- [M3SOT: Multi-frame, Multi-field, Multi-space 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06117/) (2023)
- [P2P: Part-to-Part Motion Cues Guide a Strong Tracking Framework for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05238/) (2024)
- [MVCTrack: Boosting 3D Point Cloud Tracking via Multimodal-Guided Virtual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02734/) (2024)
- [CompTrack: Information Bottleneck-Guided Low-Rank Dynamic Token Compression for Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15580/) (2025)
- [Modeling Continuous Motion for 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07605/) (2023)
- [Robust 3D Tracking with Quality-Aware Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10608/) (2023)
- [Implicit and Efficient Point Cloud Completion for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00522/) (2022)
- [SeqTrack3D: Exploring Sequence Information for Robust 3D Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16249/) (2024)
- [Towards Class-agnostic Tracking Using Feature Decorrelation in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13524/) (2022)
- [OST: Efficient One-stream Network for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08518/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D single object tracking is a key issue for robotics. In this paper, we propose a transformer module called Point-Track-Transformer (PTT) for point cloud-based 3D single object tracking. PTT module contains three blocks for feature embedding, position encoding, and self-attention feature computation. Feature embedding aims to place features closer in the embedding space if they have similar semantic information. Position encoding is used to encode coordinates of point clouds into high dimension distinguishable features. Self-attention generates refined attention features by computing attention weights. Besides, we embed the PTT module into the open-source state-of-the-art method P2B to construct PTT-Net. Experiments on the KITTI dataset reveal that our PTT-Net surpasses the state-of-the-art by a noticeable margin (~10%). Additionally, PTT-Net could achieve real-time performance (~40FPS) on NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU. Our code is open-sourced for the robotics community at https://github.com/shanjiayao/PTT.