# FlowTrack: Point-level Flow Network for 3D Single Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [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)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [3D Siamese Transformer Network for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11995/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GAFlow: Incorporating Gaussian Attention into Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16217/) (2023)
- [Exploiting More Information in Sparse Point Cloud for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00519/) (2022)
- [STTracker: Spatio-Temporal Tracker for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17440/) (2023)

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

- [MVCTrack: Boosting 3D Point Cloud Tracking via Multimodal-Guided Virtual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02734/) (2024)
- [Beyond Frame-wise Tracking: A Trajectory-based Paradigm for Efficient Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11453/) (2025)
- [TFTrack: A Template-Free Framework for Efficient 3D Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07738/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D single object tracking (SOT) is a crucial task in fields of mobile robotics and autonomous driving. Traditional motion-based approaches achieve target tracking by estimating the relative movement of target between two consecutive frames. However, they usually overlook local motion information of the target and fail to exploit historical frame information effectively. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a point-level flow method with multi-frame information for 3D SOT task, called FlowTrack. Specifically, by estimating the flow for each point in the target, our method could capture the local motion details of target, thereby improving the tracking performance. At the same time, to handle scenes with sparse points, we present a learnable target feature as the bridge to efficiently integrate target information from past frames. Moreover, we design a novel Instance Flow Head to transform dense point-level flow into instance-level motion, effectively aggregating local motion information to obtain global target motion. Finally, our method achieves competitive performance with improvements of 5.9% on the KITTI dataset and 2.9% on NuScenes. The code will be made publicly available soon.