Collaborative Multi-Object Tracking with Conformal Uncertainty Propagation

Object detection and multiple object tracking (MOT) are essential components of self-driving systems. Accurate detection and uncertainty quantification are both critical for onboard modules, such as perception, prediction, and planning, to improve the safety and robustness of autonomous vehicles. Collaborative object detection (COD) has been proposed to improve detection accuracy and reduce uncertainty by leveraging the viewpoints of multiple agents. However, little attention has been paid on how to leverage the uncertainty quantification from COD to enhance MOT performance. In this paper, as the first attempt, we design the uncertainty propagation framework to address this challenge, called MOT-CUP. Our framework first quantifies the uncertainty of COD through direct modeling and conformal prediction, and propogates this uncertainty information during the motion prediction and association steps. MOT-CUP is designed to work with different collaborative object detectors and baseline MOT algorithms. We evaluate MOT-CUP on V2X-Sim, a comprehensive collaborative perception dataset, and demonstrate a 2% improvement in accuracy and a 2.67X reduction in uncertainty compared to the baselines, e.g., SORT and ByteTrack. MOT-CUP demonstrates the importance of uncertainty quantification in both COD and MOT, and provides the first attempt to improve the accuracy and reduce the uncertainty in MOT based on COD through uncertainty propogation.