Disentangled Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Non-probability sampling network based on anomaly pedestrian trajectory discrimination for pedestrian trajectory prediction

Pedestrian trajectory prediction can provide decision support for self-driving cars and robots to avoid potential collision risks. Modelling of social relationships and multimodal prediction are core challenges in pedestrian trajectory prediction. However, there are two problems with existing methods: (1) these methods usually focus on modelling pairwise or group interactions, ignoring the importance of high-order interactions; and (2) existing methods struggle to balance the performance between deterministic and multimodal predictions. To address these issues, we propose a higher-order graph attention network for pedestrian trajectory prediction. Specifically, we first construct spatial and temporal graphs to model social interactions and temporal dependencies. To achieve high-order interaction modelling, we design a higher-order graph attention module to capture pedestrian social and temporal interactions of different orders by stacking multiple layers of graph attention. Subsequently, we design a deformable spatial-temporal sparse module to adaptively eliminate social and temporal redundant interactions. To balance deterministic and multimodal prediction performance, we design a two-stage prediction strategy. The first stage predicts pedestrian deterministic trajectories, and the second stage refines pedestrian deterministic trajectories to complete both deterministic and multimodal predictions. Quantitative analysis on the ETH, UCY, and SDD datasets demonstrates that our method outperforms existing methods in both deterministic and multimodal predictions. Qualitative analysis shows that our method can effectively describe complex social relationships and accomplish reliable trajectory prediction.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an important research area with significant applications in autonomous driving and intelligent surveillance. However, existing studies on pedestrian trajectory prediction often suffer from a noticeable discrepancy between predicted and actual trajectories, due to incomplete extraction of pedestrian trajectory features and the randomness of the pedestrian walking process. The key objective of this article is to address this issue by proposing a method that can reasonably simulate the randomness of pedestrian walking and comprehensively extract pedestrian trajectory features. To achieve this, a novel social informer model built upon the informer model is proposed in this article. The social informer utilizes a transformer encoder-based interaction module to comprehensively extract pedestrian trajectory features, which are input into the informer model for further processing. Additionally, an adaptive variance mechanism is proposed to determine the optimal variance and accurately simulate the random nature of pedestrian walking. Finally, the proposed model is evaluated in a comparative experiment on ETH and UCY datasets, with results demonstrating that the proposed model outperforms other models, exhibiting improved accuracy and performance.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction in urban environments has emerged as a critical research area with extensive applications across various domains. Accurate prediction of pedestrian trajectories is essential for the safe navigation of autonomous vehicles and robots in pedestrian-populated environments. Effective prediction models must capture both the spatial interactions among pedestrians and the temporal dependencies governing their movements. Existing research primarily focuses on forecasting a single trajectory per pedestrian, limiting its applicability in real-world scenarios characterised by diverse and unpredictable pedestrian behaviours. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Graph Convolutional Network, Spatial–Temporal Attention, and Generative Model (GSTGM) for pedestrian trajectory prediction. GSTGM employs a spatiotemporal graph convolutional network to effectively capture complex interactions between pedestrians and their environment. Additionally, it integrates a spatial–temporal attention mechanism to prioritise relevant information during the prediction process. By incorporating a time-dependent prior within the latent space and utilising a computationally efficient generative model, GSTGM facilitates the generation of diverse and realistic future trajectories. The effectiveness of GSTGM is validated through experiments on real-world scenario datasets. Compared to the state-of-the-art models on benchmark datasets such as ETH/UCY, GSTGM demonstrates superior performance in accurately predicting multiple potential trajectories for individual pedestrians. This superiority is measured using metrics such as Final Displacement Error (FDE) and Average Displacement Error (ADE). Moreover, GSTGM achieves these results with significantly faster processing speeds.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is fundamental to a wide range of scientific research work and industrial applications. Most of the current advanced trajectory prediction methods incorporate context information such as pedestrian neighbourhood, labelled static obstacles, and the background scene into the trajectory prediction process. In contrast to these methods which require rich contexts, the method in our paper focuses on predicting a pedestrian's future trajectory using his/her observed part of the trajectory only. Our method, which we refer to as LVTA, is a Location-Velocity-Temporal Attention LSTM model where two temporal attention mechanisms are applied to the hidden state vectors from the location and velocity LSTM layers. In addition, a location-velocity attention layer embedded inside a tweak module is used to improve the predicted location and velocity coordinates before they are passed to the next time step. Extensive experiments conducted on three large benchmark datasets and comparison with eleven existing trajectory prediction methods demonstrate that LVTA achieves competitive prediction performance. Specifically, LVTA attains 9.19 pixels Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 17.28 pixels Final Displacement Error (FDE) for the Central Station dataset, and 0.46 metres ADE and 0.92 metres FDE for the ETH&UCY datasets. Furthermore, evaluation on using LVTA to generate trajectories of different prediction lengths and on new scenes without the need of retraining confirms that it has good generalizability.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is important in various applications such as driverless vehicles, social robots, intelligent tracking systems and space planning. Existing methods focus on analysing the influence of neighbours but ignore the effect of the intended destinations of pedestrians which also plays a key role in route planning. In this paper, we propose a novel two- stage trajectory prediction method to yield multiple prediction trajectories with different probabilities towards different destination regions in the scene. Our method, which we refer to as Bi-Prediction, uses a bidirectional LSTM architecture to automatically classify trajectories into a small number of route classes before trajectory prediction. We have evaluated our method against two baseline methods and three state-of-art methods on two benchmark datasets. Our experimental results show that the extra classification stage improves the accuracy of the predicted trajectories.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is a critical research area with numerous domains, e.g., blind navigation, autonomous driving systems, and service robots. There exist two challenges in this research field: spatio-temporal interaction modeling among pedestrians and the uncertainty of pedestrian trajectories. To tackle these challenges, we propose a spatio-temporal interaction aware and trajectory distribution aware graph convolution network. First, we propose a spatio-temporal interaction aware module that integrates a graph convolutional network and self-attention mechanism to model spatio-temporal interactions among pedestrians. Second, we design a trajectory distribution aware module to learn latent trajectory distribution information from the measured trajectories at observed and future times. This can provide knowledge-rich trajectory distribution information for the multimodality of the predicted trajectories. Finally, to address the problem of the propagation and accumulation of prediction errors, we design a trajectory decoder to generate the multimodal future trajectories. The proposed model is evaluated utilizing videos recorded by a camera sensor in crowded areas and can be applied to predict multiple pedestrians’ future trajectories from in-vehicle cameras. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve superior results on the average displacement error (ADE) and final displacement error (FDE) metrics to state-of-the-art approaches and can predict socially acceptable future trajectories.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction via physical-guided position association learning

This paper presents a novel framework for accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction in intersection corners or near crosswalks. Given prior knowledge of curbside geometry (i.e. angle made by intersecting curbs at the corner point of interest and the coordinates of the corner itself), the presented framework can accurately predict pedestrian trajectories even in new, unseen intersections. This is achieved by learning motion primitives in a common frame, called the curbside coordinate frame. A key insight in developing this common frame is to ensure that trajectories from intersections with different geometries, representing the same behavior, are spatially similar in the common frame. Motion primitives learned in such a common frame, can then be easily generalized to predict in new intersections, with different geometries than the ones trained on. We test our algorithm on real pedestrian trajectory datasets collected at two intersections, with distinctly different curbside and crosswalk geometries. A comparison of our algorithm with [1] demonstrates improved prediction accuracies of pedestrian trajectory prediction in the case of same training and test intersections, and the improvement of accuracy in the most different training and test intersections scenarios. The result also shows additional context, such as information about pedestrian traffic lights, if available, can be easily incorporated in our prediction model for further improvement in prediction accuracy.

Trajectory prediction is a key component in the development of applications such as mixed urban traffic management and public safety. Traditional models have struggled with the complexity of modeling dynamic crowd interactions, the intricacies of spatiotemporal dependencies, and environmental constraints. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces the innovative Social Attention Graph Neural Network (SA-GAT) framework. Utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, SA-GAT encodes pedestrian trajectory data to extract temporal correlations, while Graph Attention Networks (GAT) are employed to precisely capture the subtle interactions among pedestrians. The SA-GAT framework boosts its predictive accuracy with two key innovations. First, it features a Scene Potential Module that utilizes a Scene Tensor to dynamically capture the interplay between crowds and their environment. Second, it incorporates a Transition Intention Module with a Transition Tensor, which interprets latent transfer probabilities from trajectory data to reveal pedestrians’ implicit intentions at specific locations. Based on AnyLogic modeling of the metro station on Line 10 of Chengdu Shuangliu Airport, China, numerical studies reveal that the SA-GAT model achieves a substantial reduction in ADE and FDE metrics by 34.22% and 38.04% compared to baseline models.

Pedestrian path prediction is a very challenging problem because scenes are often crowded or contain obstacles. Existing state-of-the-art long short-term memory (LSTM)-based prediction methods have been mainly focused on analyzing the influence of other people in the neighborhood of each pedestrian while neglecting the role of potential destinations in determining a walking path. In this article, we propose classifying pedestrian trajectories into a number of route classes (RCs) and using them to describe the pedestrian movement patterns. Based on the RCs obtained from trajectory clustering, our algorithm, which we name the prediction of pedestrian paths by LSTM (PoPPL), predicts the destination regions through a bidirectional LSTM classification network in the first stage and then generates trajectories corresponding to the predicted destination regions through one of the three proposed LSTM-based architectures in the second stage. Our algorithm also outputs probabilities of multiple predicted trajectories that head toward the destination regions. We have evaluated PoPPL against other state-of-the-art methods on two public data sets. The results show that our algorithm outperforms other methods and incorporating potential destination prediction improves the trajectory prediction accuracy.

Enhancing Humans Trust in Robots through Explanations

In autonomous driving scenarios, pedestrian trajectory prediction is an important research direction. Based on the spatio-temporal graph convolutional neural network, we propose a new pedestrian trajectory prediction algorithm. The new algorithm constructs a series of new models around pedestrian intention estimation. The construction of the estimation algorithm considers the following aspects: the contextual information of pedestrians and the surrounding environment, the “pedestrian ego-vehicle” interaction combined with the vehicle speed estimation, the pedestrian’s own skeletal structure information and body language estimation, which includes head joints and the relative structural relationship of the torso joints, including whether it is out of the same plane, is rotated, and so on. Skeleton information feature extraction and construction adopts the method of graph convolutional neural network to structure pedestrians into joints in the form of graphs in non-Euclidean space, and further adopts spatial temporal graph convolutional network for feature extraction and learning. The new method is named a “head-torso”-based spatial temporal graph convolutional network (HT-STGCN). On the dataset PID, the novel method achieves substantial improvements over mainstream methods. Experimental results show that combining HT-STGCN with observed action can improve trajectory prediction.

Physics constrained pedestrian trajectory prediction with probability quantification

This article introduces a novel model for low-quality pedestrian trajectory prediction, the social nonstationary transformers (NSTransformers), that merges the strengths of NSTransformers and spatiotemporal graph transformer (STAR). The model can capture social interaction cues among pedestrians and integrate features across spatial and temporal dimensions to enhance the precision and resilience of trajectory predictions. We also propose an enhanced loss function that combines diversity loss with logarithmic root mean squared error (log-RMSE) to guarantee the reasonableness and diversity of the generated trajectories. This design adapts well to complex pedestrian interaction scenarios, thereby improving the reliability and accuracy of trajectory prediction. Furthermore, we integrate a generative adversarial network (GAN) to model the randomness inherent in pedestrian trajectories. Compared to the conventional standard Gaussian distribution, our GAN approach better simulates the intricate distribution found in pedestrian trajectories, enhancing the trajectory prediction's diversity and robustness. Experimental results reveal that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. This research opens the avenue for future exploration in low-quality pedestrian trajectory prediction.