LiDAR-camera 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) combines rich visual semantics with accurate depth cues to improve trajectory consistency and tracking reliability. In practice, however, LiDAR and cameras operate at different sampling rates. To maintain temporal alignment, existing data pipelines usually synchronize heterogeneous sensor streams and annotate them at a reduced shared frequency, forcing most prior methods to perform spatial fusion only at synchronized timestamps through projection-based or learnable cross-sensor association. As a result, abundant asynchronous observations remain underexploited, despite their potential to support more frequent association and more robust trajectory estimation over short temporal intervals. To address this limitation, we propose Fusion-Poly, a spatial-temporal fusion framework for 3D MOT that integrates asynchronous LiDAR and camera data. Fusion-Poly associates trajectories with multi-modal observations at synchronized timestamps and with single-modal observations at asynchronous timestamps, enabling higher-frequency updates of motion and existence states. The framework contains three key components: a frequency-aware cascade matching module that adapts to synchronized and asynchronous frames according to available detection modalities; a frequency-aware trajectory estimation module that maintains trajectories through high-frequency motion prediction, differential updates, and confidence-calibrated lifecycle management; and a full-state observation alignment module that improves cross-modal consistency at synchronized timestamps by optimizing image-projection errors. On the nuScenes test set, Fusion-Poly achieves 76.5% AMOTA, establishing a new state of the art among tracking-by-detection 3D MOT methods. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component. Code will be released.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Fusion-Poly differs from existing LiDAR-Camera 3D MOT methods by explicitly exploiting asynchronous sensor data at different frequencies, increasing matching frequency, and improving tracking robustness.
Fig. 2: The pipeline of Fusion-Poly. We propose a unified LiDAR-Camera 3D MOT framework that jointly performs cross-modal fusion and cross-frequency integration by simultaneously incorporating synchronous and asynchronous data.
TABLE III: Ablation experiment of Fusion-Poly on nuScenes val set. Async. Data : using 4 Hz camera-only 2D detections; FACM: matching for sync./async. frames; FATE: confidence-calibrated lifecycle management; GAAM: geometry-aware alignment.
Metric
AMOTA ↑
MOTA ↑
IDS ↓
Eucl
77.0
67.2
420
GIoU
77.0
67.2
414
IoU
77.1
67.4
416
TABLE IV: Comparison of different metric settings in GAAM on nuScenes val set. Eucl means Euclidean distance.
Method
Deviation
AMOTA ↑
MOTA ↑
Degradation ↓
EagerMOT †
-
70.3
60.5
-
0.1
49.3
40.0
-29.9%
0.2
40.4
34.3
-42.5%
0.3
36.5
31.6
-48.1%
Fusion-Poly
-
77.1
67.3
-
0.1
66.5
57.7
-13.8%
TABLE V: Comparison of noise robustness on the nuScenes val set. Zero-mean Gaussian noise with varying standard deviations is injected into camera extrinsics to simulate real-world sensor noise. † : We reproduced the results of EagerMOT [ 6 ] using the official code. All methods use the same detectors: CenterPoint [ 25 ] and Cascade R-CNN [ 28 ] .
Method
MA
P3DA
P2DA
AMOTA ↑
MOTA ↑
IDS ↓
Exp0
✓
-
-
75.5
65.6
809
Exp1
✓
✓
-
76.5
66.5
420
Exp2
✓
✓
✓
77.1
67.3
416
TABLE VI: Comparison of association strategy on nuScenes val set. MA, P3DA, P2DA are defined in Section III-C .
Fig. 3: Visualization results of Fusion-Poly with different inputs. In this figure, 4 Hz and 2 Hz denote the input frequency of Cascade R-CNN results, and both settings adopt 2 Hz CenterPoint results.
Method
AMOTA ↑
MOTA ↑
IDS ↓
Average
72.9
61.7
554
EMA
73.8
62.4
526
Max
75.9
65.7
484
Noisy-OR (Ours)
77.1
67.3
416
TABLE VII: Comparison of different score update strategies between sfused and st,t−1 on nuScenes val set. EMA: exponentially weighted moving average.
Fig. 4: Performance comparison with identical key parameters across all categories.
Industrial Systems Institute, Athena Research Center, Patras Science Park, Greece · 3Dpt. of Informatics & Telecom., University of Ioannina, Arta, Greece · Avisense.AI, Patras, Greece +1