# Person Detection and Tracking from an Overhead Crane LiDAR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04938/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [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)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [Point-GNN: Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection in a Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01251/) (2020)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [3D Object Detection with Pointformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11409/) (2020)
- [Multiple Object Tracking: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7618/) (2014)
- [LaserNet: An Efficient Probabilistic 3D Object Detector for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08701/) (2019)
- [CIA-SSD: Confident IoU-Aware Single-Stage Object Detector From Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03015/) (2020)
- [SimpleTrack: Understanding and Rethinking 3D Multi-object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09621/) (2021)
- [Tracking without Label: Unsupervised Multiple Object Tracking via Contrastive Similarity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00942/) (2023)
- [FVNet: 3D Front-View Proposal Generation for Real-Time Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10750/) (2019)
- [Cross-Modal Analysis of Human Detection for Robotics: An Industrial Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01495/) (2021)
- [LiDAR MOT-DETR: A LiDAR-based Two-Stage Transformer for 3D Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12753/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates person detection and tracking in an industrial indoor workspace using a LiDAR mounted on an overhead crane. The overhead viewpoint introduces a strong domain shift from common vehicle-centric LiDAR benchmarks, and limited availability of suitable public training data. Henceforth, we curate a site-specific overhead LiDAR dataset with 3D human bounding-box annotations and adapt selected candidate 3D detectors under a unified training and evaluation protocol. We further integrate lightweight tracking-by-detection using AB3DMOT and SimpleTrack to maintain person identities over time. Detection performance is reported with distance-sliced evaluation to quantify the practical operating envelope of the sensing setup. The best adapted detector configurations achieve average precision (AP) up to 0.84 within a 5.0 m horizontal radius, increasing to 0.97 at 1.0 m, with VoxelNeXt and SECOND emerging as the most reliable backbones across this range. The acquired results contribute in bridging the domain gap between standard driving datasets and overhead sensing for person detection and tracking. We also report latency measurements, highlighting practical real-time feasibility. Finally, we release our dataset and implementations in GitHub to support further research