Inverse Neural Rendering for Explainable Multi-Object Tracking
Julian Ost Tanushree Banerjee Mario Bijelic Felix Heide
Today, most methods for image understanding tasks rely on feed-forward neural
networks. While this approach has allowed for empirical accuracy, efficiency,
and task adaptation via fine-tuning, it also comes with fundamental
disadvantages. Existing networks often struggle to generalize across different
datasets, even on the same task. By design, these networks ultimately reason
about high-dimensional scene features, which are challenging to analyze. This
is true especially when attempting to predict 3D information based on 2D
images. We propose to recast 3D multi-object tracking from RGB cameras as an
\emph{Inverse Rendering (IR)} problem, by optimizing via a differentiable
rendering pipeline over the latent space of pre-trained 3D object
representations and retrieve the latents that best represent object instances
in a given input image. To this end, we optimize an image loss over generative
latent spaces that inherently disentangle shape and appearance properties. We
investigate not only an alternate take on tracking but our method also enables
examining the generated objects, reasoning about failure situations, and
resolving ambiguous cases. We validate the generalization and scaling
capabilities of our method by learning the generative prior exclusively from
synthetic data and assessing camera-based 3D tracking on the nuScenes and Waymo
datasets. Both these datasets are completely unseen to our method and do not
require fine-tuning. Videos and code are available at
https://light.princeton.edu/inverse-rendering-tracking/.