VisionTrap: Vision-Augmented Trajectory Prediction Guided by Textual Descriptions

TL;DR

VisionTrap introduces a real-time trajectory prediction method for autonomous vehicles that leverages visual cues and textual descriptions, enhancing accuracy over traditional track-based models.

Contribution

It is the first to incorporate surround-view visual inputs and textual supervision from VLM and LLM into trajectory prediction, improving performance and interpretability.

Findings

Visual inputs improve prediction accuracy.

Textual descriptions guide the model effectively.

Achieves 53 ms latency suitable for real-time use.

Abstract

Predicting future trajectories for other road agents is an essential task for autonomous vehicles. Established trajectory prediction methods primarily use agent tracks generated by a detection and tracking system and HD map as inputs. In this work, we propose a novel method that also incorporates visual input from surround-view cameras, allowing the model to utilize visual cues such as human gazes and gestures, road conditions, vehicle turn signals, etc, which are typically hidden from the model in prior methods. Furthermore, we use textual descriptions generated by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) as supervision during training to guide the model on what to learn from the input data. Despite using these extra inputs, our method achieves a latency of 53 ms, making it feasible for real-time processing, which is significantly faster than that of previous single-agent prediction methods with similar performance. Our experiments show that both the visual inputs and the textual descriptions contribute to improvements in trajectory prediction performance, and our qualitative analysis highlights how the model is able to exploit these additional inputs. Lastly, in this work we create and release the nuScenes-Text dataset, which augments the established nuScenes dataset with rich textual annotations for every scene, demonstrating the positive impact of utilizing VLM on trajectory prediction. Our project page is at https://moonseokha.github.io/VisionTrap/