Geometric Deep Learning for Autonomous Driving: Unlocking the Power of Graph Neural Networks With CommonRoad-Geometric

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Python framework that leverages graph neural networks for autonomous driving by providing a customizable pipeline for traffic data representation, enhancing research efficiency and comparability.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive platform for GNN-based traffic data processing, facilitating autonomous driving research and standardizing datasets.

Findings

Enables efficient extraction of graph datasets from traffic scenarios.

Improves comparability between GNN-based autonomous driving approaches.

Simplifies dataset curation for researchers.

Abstract

Heterogeneous graphs offer powerful data representations for traffic, given their ability to model the complex interaction effects among a varying number of traffic participants and the underlying road infrastructure. With the recent advent of graph neural networks (GNNs) as the accompanying deep learning framework, the graph structure can be efficiently leveraged for various machine learning applications such as trajectory prediction. As a first of its kind, our proposed Python framework offers an easy-to-use and fully customizable data processing pipeline to extract standardized graph datasets from traffic scenarios. Providing a platform for GNN-based autonomous driving research, it improves comparability between approaches and allows researchers to focus on model implementation instead of dataset curation.