# Small Object Tracking in LiDAR Point Cloud: Learning the Target-awareness Prototype and Fine-grained Search Region

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Relation Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11575/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05237/) (2017)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Inside-Outside Net: Detecting Objects in Context with Skip Pooling and Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04143/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05274/) (2017)
- [Leveraging Shape Completion for 3D Siamese Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01784/) (2019)
- [Augmentation for small object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07296/) (2019)
- [Box-Aware Feature Enhancement for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04728/) (2021)
- [PTTR: Relational 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02857/) (2021)
- [PTT: Point-Track-Transformer Module for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06455/) (2021)
- [PyramidBox: A Context-assisted Single Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07737/) (2018)
- [AugFPN: Improving Multi-scale Feature Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05384/) (2019)
- [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 Voxel-to-BEV Tracker for Sparse Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04426/) (2021)
- [ISBNet: a 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation Network with Instance-aware Sampling and Box-aware Dynamic Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00246/) (2023)
- [3D Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14921/) (2021)
- [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)
- [3D Siamese Transformer Network for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11995/) (2022)
- [CXTrack: Improving 3D Point Cloud Tracking with Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08542/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Scale Training for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12432/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MambaTrack3D: A State Space Model Framework for LiDAR-Based Object Tracking under High Temporal Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15077/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single Object Tracking in LiDAR point cloud is one of the most essential parts of environmental perception, in which small objects are inevitable in real-world scenarios and will bring a significant barrier to the accurate location. However, the existing methods concentrate more on exploring universal architectures for common categories and overlook the challenges that small objects have long been thorny due to the relative deficiency of foreground points and a low tolerance for disturbances. To this end, we propose a Siamese network-based method for small object tracking in the LiDAR point cloud, which is composed of the target-awareness prototype mining (TAPM) module and the regional grid subdivision (RGS) module. The TAPM module adopts the reconstruction mechanism of the masked decoder to learn the prototype in the feature space, aiming to highlight the presence of foreground points that will facilitate the subsequent location of small objects. Through the above prototype is capable of accentuating the small object of interest, the positioning deviation in feature maps still leads to high tracking errors. To alleviate this issue, the RGS module is proposed to recover the fine-grained features of the search region based on ViT and pixel shuffle layers. In addition, apart from the normal settings, we elaborately design a scaling experiment to evaluate the robustness of the different trackers on small objects. Extensive experiments on KITTI and nuScenes demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the tracking performance of small targets without affecting normal-sized objects.