# Uncertainty-Aware AB3DMOT by Variational 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Weight Uncertainty in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05424/) (2015)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Revisiting the Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07998/) (2021)
- [Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07356/) (2018)
- [Randomized Prior Functions for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03335/) (2018)
- [Orthographic Feature Transform for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08188/) (2018)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR++: Accurate Depth for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06310/) (2019)
- [LaserNet: An Efficient Probabilistic 3D Object Detector for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08701/) (2019)
- [A General Framework for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06890/) (2019)
- [TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05163/) (2019)
- [MonoGRNet: A Geometric Reasoning Network for Monocular 3D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10247/) (2018)
- [Towards Safe Autonomous Driving: Capture Uncertainty in the Deep Neural Network For Lidar 3D Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05132/) (2018)
- [Joint Monocular 3D Vehicle Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10742/) (2018)
- [Mono3D++: Monocular 3D Vehicle Detection with Two-Scale 3D Hypotheses and Task Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03446/) (2019)
- [Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation using Convolutional Neural Networks with Test-Time Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07884/) (2018)
- [Deep Sub-Ensembles for Fast Uncertainty Estimation in Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08168/) (2019)
- [Complexer-YOLO: Real-Time 3D Object Detection and Tracking on Semantic Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07537/) (2019)
- [Learning an Uncertainty-Aware Object Detector for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11375/) (2019)
- [Multivariate Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14215/) (2019)
- [Bayesian Learning for Neural Networks: an algorithmic survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11865/) (2022)
- [Confidence Guided Stereo 3D Object Detection with Split Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05505/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Voxel based 3D Object Detection and Tracking with von-Mises Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02553/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Mutual Information-calibrated Conformal Feature Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal 3D Object Detection at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09593/) (2023)
- [ELMAR: Enhancing LiDAR Detection with 4D Radar Motion Awareness and Cross-modal Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17958/) (2025)
- [Variational Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01699/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving needs to rely on high-quality 3D object detection to ensure safe navigation in the world. Uncertainty estimation is an effective tool to provide statistically accurate predictions, while the associated detection uncertainty can be used to implement a more safe navigation protocol or include the user in the loop. In this paper, we propose a Variational Neural Network-based TANet 3D object detector to generate 3D object detections with uncertainty and introduce these detections to an uncertainty-aware AB3DMOT tracker. This is done by applying a linear transformation to the estimated uncertainty matrix, which is subsequently used as a measurement noise for the adopted Kalman filter. We implement two ways to estimate output uncertainty, i.e., internally, by computing the variance of the CNN outputs and then propagating the uncertainty through the post-processing, and externally, by associating the final predictions of different samples and computing the covariance of each predicted box. In experiments, we show that the external uncertainty estimation leads to better results, outperforming both internal uncertainty estimation and classical tracking approaches. Furthermore, we propose a method to initialize the Variational 3D object detector with a pretrained TANet model, which leads to the best performing models.