Person Detection and Tracking from an Overhead Crane LiDAR
This work provides a solution for real-time person detection and tracking in industrial indoor settings using overhead LiDAR, which is crucial for safety and automation in such environments.
This paper addresses person detection and tracking in industrial indoor environments using overhead crane LiDAR, a domain with limited public data. The authors curated a new dataset and adapted existing 3D detectors, achieving an average precision (AP) of up to 0.84 within a 5.0 m horizontal radius and 0.97 at 1.0 m, with VoxelNeXt and SECOND performing best.
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