Spatio-Temporal Interaction Aware and Trajectory Distribution Aware Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Multimodal Trajectory Prediction

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 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.

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

Accurate and fast prediction of pedestrian trajectory is very important. However, the interaction between pedestrians is complex, pedestrians are affected not only by their own motion but also by the neighboring pedestrians. Some methods do not extract the pedestrian motion features completely. It is easy to ignore a few of important features of pedestrians. The Spatial-Temporal Attention Graph Convolutional Network (ST-AGNN) for pedestrian trajectory prediction is proposed in this paper. ST-AGNN model can extract the spatial interaction features of each time step and stack the spatial features to obtain the spatial-temporal features. It can predict the future trajectory by using Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). We evaluate the average displacement error (ADE) and final displacement error (FDE) of the proposed method on ETH and UCY datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in accuracy and efficiency.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction via physical-guided position association learning

Forecasting pedestrian trajectories in dynamic scenes remains a critical problem in various applications, such as autonomous driving and socially aware robots. Such forecasting is challenging due to human-human and human-object interactions and future uncertainties caused by human randomness. Generative model-based methods handle future uncertainties by sampling a latent variable. However, few studies explored the generation of the latent variable. In this work, we propose the trajectory predictor with pseudo Oracle (TPPO), which is a generative model-based trajectory predictor. The first pseudo oracle is pedestrians’ moving directions, and the second one is the latent variable estimated from ground truth trajectories. A social attention module is used to aggregate neighbors’ interactions based on the correlation between pedestrians’ moving directions and future trajectories. This correlation is inspired by the fact that pedestrians’ future trajectories are often influenced by pedestrians in front. A latent variable predictor is proposed to estimate latent variable distributions from observed and ground-truth trajectories. Moreover, the gap between these two distributions is minimized during training. Therefore, the latent variable predictor can estimate the latent variable from observed trajectories to approximate that estimated from ground-truth trajectories. We compare the performance of TPPO with related methods on several public datasets. Results demonstrate that TPPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods with low average and final displacement errors. The ablation study shows that the prediction performance will not dramatically decrease as sampling times decline during tests.

Understanding crowd motion dynamics and forecasting the future pedestrian trajectories are critical to various applications, e.g. autonomous driving and surveillance system. This task is challenging because when pedestrians plan the future paths in real crowd scenes, they will distinguish the priorities of following their predetermined destinations and responding to the motion behaviors of neighboring pedestrians. However, most of the existing methods ignore the problem of intention-interaction trade-off. In this paper, we tackle this problem by a hierarchical network, which achieves dynamically reasoning predetermined destinations and future trajectories. A novel graph structure called Intention-Interaction Graph (IIG) is designed to jointly model the self intentions and social interactions. To aggregate information in IIG, Interaction Gated Graph Attention Networks (IGGAN) consisting of a gate mechanism and an attention mechanism is proposed, thus achieving reasoning the influence degree of neighboring pedestrians and destinations. Experimental results on multiple widely used pedestrian trajectory prediction datasets, including two datasets in ETH and three datasets in UCY, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving and crowd surveillance. This paper proposes the OV-SKTGCNN model, an enhancement to the Social-STGCNN model, aimed at addressing its low prediction accuracy and limitations in dealing with forces between pedestrians. By rigorously dividing monocular and binocular overlapping visual regions and utilizing different influence factors, the model pedestrian interactions more realistically. The Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) combined with Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) greatly improve the ability to extract temporal features. Experimental results on the ETH and UCY datasets demonstrate that the model reduces the Final Displacement Error (FDE) by an average of 23% and the Average Displacement Error (ADE) by 18% compared to Social-STGCNN. The proposed OV-SKTGCNN model demonstrates improved prediction accuracy and better captures the subtleties of pedestrian movements.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction enables faster progress in autonomous driving and robot navigation where complex social and environmental interactions involve. Previous models use grid-based pooling or global attention to measure social interactions and use Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to generate sequences. However, these methods can not extract latent features from temporal and spatial information simultaneously. To address the limitation of previous work, we propose a Self-Centered Star Graph with Attention (SCSG Attention) framework. Firstly, pedestrians’ historical trajectories are encoded. Then multi-head attention mechanism plays a role as enhancement of social interaction awareness and simulation of physical attention from human beings. Lastly, the self-centered star graph decoder can aggregate temporal and spatial features and make predictions. Experiments are conducted on public benchmark datasets and measured with uniform standards. Our results show an improvement over the state-of-the-art algorithms by \(38\%\) on average displacement error (ADE) and \(19\%\) on final displacement error (FDE). Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the star graph has better performance in efficiency of training convergence and ends up with better results in limited time.

Predicting and planning the future trajectories of various traffic participants is an important task with multiple applications, including autonomous vehicles, service robots, and intelligent transportation. However, the diversity of heterogeneous agents including pedestrians, bicycles, and vehicles in traffic scenarios presents substantial challenges to this task. Current models do not fully capture the implicit and explicit interaction relationships among these heterogeneous agents and often overlook the significance of extracting implicit correlations from agent features. To address these issues, we introduce a novel model for trajectory prediction: Heterogeneous Graph Structure Contrast Optimization (HGSCO). To accurately capture the interaction relationships among heterogeneous agents, HGSCO constructs semantic graph structures representing implicit relationships and meta-path graph structures representing explicit relationships. Then, HGSCO introduces a cross-view contrastive learning approach, which optimizes the heterogeneous graph structure by maximizing mutual information between the two types of graph structures. The model can provide precise interaction relationships among heterogeneous agents by effectively fusing these two graph representations with a gated fusion method. We utilized video data captured by camera sensors in complex environments with multiple agents to conduct experiments. Our proposed model achieved an 11.5% and 6.7% reduction in Average Displacement Error (ADE) across these datasets, respectively, and a reduction of 15.6% and 8.1% in Final Displacement Error (FDE). The results demonstrate that HGSCO significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods regarding trajectory prediction accuracy.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from egocentric monocular video is hindered by camera motion, intermittent occlusions, and complex social interactions. We present NIM-STGCN, a unified framework whose core contribution is a differentiable view normalization(GVN) that couples an enhanced differentiable PnP layer (ED-PnP) with an $$\textrm{SE}(3)$$ SE ( 3 ) warp to align past observations into a single virtual static camera frame. Because GVN is trained end-to-end, forecasting losses back-propagate to pose estimation, yielding geometrically cleaner inputs. On the normalized histories, a lightweight Gated Convolutional Imputation Module (GCIM) recovers missing bounding-box measurements while preserving observed entries, and an efficient spatio-temporal GCN encodes agent dynamics and interactions (optionally augmented by a physics-guided kinematics–interaction prior, PKIM). A Gaussian-mixture predictor produces multi-modal futures and is optimized with a sequence-level negative log-likelihood together with a time-weighted position loss. Extensive experiments on the JAAD and PIE benchmarks show that NIM-STGCN reduces Average Displacement Error (ADE) and Final Displacement Error (FDE) by 12–18 % compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/fantot/NIM-STGCN . Graphical abstract

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.

Pedestrian behavior anticipation is a key challenge in the design of assistive and autonomous driving systems suitable for urban environments. An intelligent system should be able to understand the intentions or underlying motives of pedestrians and to predict their forthcoming actions. To date, only a few public datasets were proposed for the purpose of studying pedestrian behavior prediction in the context of intelligent driving. To this end, we propose a novel large-scale dataset designed for pedestrian intention estimation (PIE). We conducted a large-scale human experiment to establish human reference data for pedestrian intention in traffic scenes. We propose models for estimating pedestrian crossing intention and predicting their future trajectory. Our intention estimation model achieves 79% accuracy and our trajectory prediction algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art by 26% on the proposed dataset. We further show that combining pedestrian intention with observed motion improves trajectory prediction. The dataset and models are available at http://data.nvision2.eecs.yorku.ca/PIE_dataset/.

Physics constrained pedestrian trajectory prediction with probability quantification

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.