Stepwise Goal-Driven Networks for Trajectory Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces SGNet, a recurrent network that predicts future trajectories by estimating multiple evolving goals at different time scales, leading to improved accuracy across diverse datasets.

Contribution

The novel stepwise goal-driven network models multiple changing goals over time, enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy compared to prior single-goal approaches.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on all evaluated datasets.

Effectively models goal changes over multiple time scales.

Outperforms existing methods in trajectory prediction accuracy.

Abstract

We propose to predict the future trajectories of observed agents (e.g., pedestrians or vehicles) by estimating and using their goals at multiple time scales. We argue that the goal of a moving agent may change over time, and modeling goals continuously provides more accurate and detailed information for future trajectory estimation. To this end, we present a recurrent network for trajectory prediction, called Stepwise Goal-Driven Network (SGNet). Unlike prior work that models only a single, long-term goal, SGNet estimates and uses goals at multiple temporal scales. In particular, it incorporates an encoder that captures historical information, a stepwise goal estimator that predicts successive goals into the future, and a decoder that predicts future trajectory. We evaluate our model on three first-person traffic datasets (HEV-I, JAAD, and PIE) as well as on three bird's eye view datasets (NuScenes, ETH, and UCY), and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on all datasets. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/ChuhuaW/SGNet.pytorch.