# Looking to Relations for Future Trajectory Forecast

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a relation-aware framework for predicting future trajectories of road users by modeling their interactions with each other and the environment, improving prediction accuracy over existing methods.

## Contribution

It presents a novel relation-aware approach that explicitly constructs and leverages relational features from spatio-temporal interactions for trajectory forecasting.

## Key findings

- Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets
- Effectively models human-human and human-space interactions
- Provides robust and accurate trajectory predictions

## Abstract

Inferring relational behavior between road users as well as road users and their surrounding physical space is an important step toward effective modeling and prediction of navigation strategies adopted by participants in road scenes. To this end, we propose a relation-aware framework for future trajectory forecast. Our system aims to infer relational information from the interactions of road users with each other and with the environment. The first module involves visual encoding of spatio-temporal features, which captures human-human and human-space interactions over time. The following module explicitly constructs pair-wise relations from spatio-temporal interactions and identifies more descriptive relations that highly influence future motion of the target road user by considering its past trajectory. The resulting relational features are used to forecast future locations of the target, in the form of heatmaps with an additional guidance of spatial dependencies and consideration of the uncertainty. Extensive evaluations on the public benchmark datasets demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of the proposed framework as observed by performances higher than the state-of-the-art methods.