LANet: A Lane Boundaries-Aware Approach For Robust Trajectory Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces LANet, a novel trajectory prediction model for autonomous vehicles that utilizes multiple vector map elements like lane boundaries and road edges, combined with an efficient pruning mechanism, to improve accuracy and environmental understanding.

Contribution

LANet advances motion forecasting by integrating diverse vector map components and a pruning strategy, surpassing lane centerline-based models in environmental representation and prediction performance.

Findings

Improved trajectory prediction accuracy on Argoverse 2 dataset.

Effective fusion of multiple vector map elements enhances environmental understanding.

Pruning mechanism maintains computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy.

Abstract

Accurate motion forecasting is critical for safe and efficient autonomous driving, enabling vehicles to predict future trajectories and make informed decisions in complex traffic scenarios. Most of the current designs of motion prediction models are based on the major representation of lane centerlines, which limits their capability to capture critical road environments and traffic rules and constraints. In this work, we propose an enhanced motion forecasting model informed by multiple vector map elements, including lane boundaries and road edges, that facilitates a richer and more complete representation of driving environments. An effective feature fusion strategy is developed to merge information in different vector map components, where the model learns holistic information on road structures and their interactions with agents. Since encoding more information about the road environment increases memory usage and is computationally expensive, we developed an effective pruning mechanism that filters the most relevant map connections to the target agent, ensuring computational efficiency while maintaining essential spatial and semantic relationships for accurate trajectory prediction. Overcoming the limitations of lane centerline-based models, our method provides a more informative and efficient representation of the driving environment and advances the state of the art for autonomous vehicle motion forecasting. We verify our approach with extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 motion forecasting dataset, where our method maintains competitiveness on AV2 while achieving improved performance. Index Terms-Autonomous driving, trajectory prediction, vector map elements, road topology, connection pruning, Argoverse 2.