GSGFormer: Generative Social Graph Transformer for Multimodal Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Pedestrian trajectory prediction, vital for selfdriving cars and socially-aware robots, is complicated due to intricate interactions between pedestrians, their environment, and other Vulnerable Road Users. This paper presents GSGFormer, an innovative generative model adept at predicting pedestrian trajectories by considering these complex interactions and offering a plethora of potential modal behaviors. We incorporate a heterogeneous graph neural network to capture interactions between pedestrians, semantic maps, and potential destinations. The Transformer module extracts temporal features, while our novel CVAE-Residual-GMM module promotes diverse behavioral modality generation. Through evaluations on multiple public datasets, GSGFormer not only outperforms leading methods with ample data but also remains competitive when data is limited.

Building Prior Knowledge: A Markov Based Pedestrian Prediction Model Using Urban Environmental Data

Autonomous Vehicles navigating in urban areas have a need to understand and predict future pedestrian behavior for safer navigation. This high level of situational awareness requires observing pedestrian behavior and extrapolating their positions to know future positions. While some work has been done in this field using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), one of the few observed drawbacks of the method is the need for informed priors for learning behavior. In this work, an extension to the Growing Hidden Markov Model (GHMM) method is proposed to solve some of these drawbacks. This is achieved by building on existing work using potential cost maps and the principle of Natural Vision. As a consequence, the proposed model is able to predict pedestrian positions more precisely over a longer horizon compared to the state of the art. The method is tested over "legal" and "illegal" behavior of pedestrians, having trained the model with sparse observations and partial trajectories. The method, with no training data, is compared against a trained state of the art model. It is observed that the proposed method is robust even in new, previously unseen areas.