Trajectory Prediction of Traffic Agents: Incorporating context into machine learning approaches

For a vehicle to navigate autonomously, it needs to perceive its surroundings and estimate the future state of the relevant traffic-agents with which it might interact as it navigates across public road networks. Predicting the future state of the perceived entities is a challenge, as these might appear to move in a stochastic manner. However, their motion is constrained to an extent by context, in particular the road network structure. Conventional machine learning methods are mainly trained using data from the perceived entities without considering roads, as a result trajectory prediction is difficult. In this paper, the notion of maps representing the road structure are included into the machine learning process. For this purpose, 3D LiDAR points and maps in the form of binary masks are used. These are used on a recurrent artificial neural network, the LSTM encoder-decoder based architecture to predict the motion of the interacting traffic agents. A comparison between the proposed solution with one that is only sensor driven (LiDAR) is included. For this purpose, NuScenes dataset is utilised, that includes annotated 3D point clouds. The results have demonstrated the importance of context to enhance our prediction performance as well as the capability of our machine learning framework to incorporate map information.