# PTTR: Relational 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02857 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02857/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [NormFace: L2 Hypersphere Embedding for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06369/) (2017)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [Variational Relational Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10154/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Box-Aware Feature Enhancement for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04728/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Detection with Multi-Level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11355/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Accelerating DETR Convergence via Semantic-Aligned Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06883/) (2022)
- [Cross-modal Orthogonal High-rank Augmentation for RGB-Event Transformer-trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04129/) (2023)
- [Transformers in 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07417/) (2022)
- [CXTrack: Improving 3D Point Cloud Tracking with Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08542/) (2022)
- [MBPTrack: Improving 3D Point Cloud Tracking with Memory Networks and Box Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05071/) (2023)
- [GLT-T: Global-Local Transformer Voting for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10927/) (2022)
- [DropMAE: Learning Representations via Masked Autoencoders with Spatial-Attention Dropout for Temporal Matching Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00571/) (2023)
- [3D Vision with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04309/) (2022)
- [Exploring Point-BEV Fusion for 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05216/) (2022)
- [Human-centric Scene Understanding for 3D Large-scale Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14392/) (2023)
- [Instance Tracking in 3D Scenes from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04117/) (2023)
- [GarmentTracking: Category-Level Garment Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13913/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Living Scenes: Multi-object Relocalization and Reconstruction in Changing 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09138/) (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)
- [Towards Category Unification of 3D Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11204/) (2024)
- [SpOT: Spatiotemporal Modeling for 3D Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05856/) (2022)
- [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)
- [V2X-PC: Vehicle-to-everything Collaborative Perception via Point Cluster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16635/) (2024)
- [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)
- [An Efficient Semi-Automated Scheme for Infrastructure LiDAR Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10732/) (2023)
- [Temporally-Adaptive Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05787/) (2023)
- [Robust 3D Tracking with Quality-Aware Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10608/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In a point cloud sequence, 3D object tracking aims to predict the location and orientation of an object in the current search point cloud given a template point cloud. Motivated by the success of transformers, we propose Point Tracking TRansformer (PTTR), which efficiently predicts high-quality 3D tracking results in a coarse-to-fine manner with the help of transformer operations. PTTR consists of three novel designs. 1) Instead of random sampling, we design Relation-Aware Sampling to preserve relevant points to given templates during subsampling. 2) Furthermore, we propose a Point Relation Transformer (PRT) consisting of a self-attention and a cross-attention module. The global self-attention operation captures long-range dependencies to enhance encoded point features for the search area and the template, respectively. Subsequently, we generate the coarse tracking results by matching the two sets of point features via cross-attention. 3) Based on the coarse tracking results, we employ a novel Prediction Refinement Module to obtain the final refined prediction. In addition, we create a large-scale point cloud single object tracking benchmark based on the Waymo Open Dataset. Extensive experiments show that PTTR achieves superior point cloud tracking in both accuracy and efficiency.