A Novel Deep Neural Network for Trajectory Prediction in Automated
  Vehicles Using Velocity Vector Field
MReza Alipour Sormoli Amir Samadi Sajjad Mozaffari Konstantinos Koufos Mehrdad Dianati Roger Woodman
Anticipating the motion of other road users is crucial for automated driving
systems (ADS), as it enables safe and informed downstream decision-making and
motion planning. Unfortunately, contemporary learning-based approaches for
motion prediction exhibit significant performance degradation as the prediction
horizon increases or the observation window decreases. This paper proposes a
novel technique for trajectory prediction that combines a data-driven
learning-based method with a velocity vector field (VVF) generated from a
nature-inspired concept, i.e., fluid flow dynamics. In this work, the vector
field is incorporated as an additional input to a convolutional-recurrent deep
neural network to help predict the most likely future trajectories given a
sequence of bird's eye view scene representations. The performance of the
proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods on the HighD dataset
demonstrating that the VVF inclusion improves the prediction accuracy for both
short and long-term (5~sec) time horizons. It is also shown that the accuracy
remains consistent with decreasing observation windows which alleviates the
requirement of a long history of past observations for accurate trajectory
prediction. Source codes are available at:
https://github.com/Amir-Samadi/VVF-TP.