SVG-Net: An SVG-based Trajectory Prediction Model

Anticipating motions of vehicles in a scene is an essential problem for safe autonomous driving systems. To this end, the comprehension of the scene's infrastructure is often the main clue for predicting future trajectories. Most of the proposed approaches represent the scene with a rasterized format and some of the more recent approaches leverage custom vectorized formats. In contrast, we propose representing the scene's information by employing Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG is a well-established format that matches the problem of trajectory prediction better than rasterized formats while being more general than arbitrary vectorized formats. SVG has the potential to provide the convenience and generality of raster-based solutions if coupled with a powerful tool such as CNNs, for which we introduce SVG-Net. SVG-Net is a Transformer-based Neural Network that can effectively capture the scene's information from SVG inputs. Thanks to the self-attention mechanism in its Transformers, SVG-Net can also adequately apprehend relations amongst the scene and the agents. We demonstrate SVG-Net's effectiveness by evaluating its performance on the publicly available Argoverse forecasting dataset. Finally, we illustrate how, by using SVG, one can benefit from datasets and advancements in other research fronts that also utilize the same input format. Our code is available at https://vita-epfl.github.io/SVGNet/.