Learning Pedestrian Actions to Ensure Safe Autonomous Driving
Jia Huang Alvika Gautam Srikanth Saripalli
To ensure safe autonomous driving in urban environments with complex
vehicle-pedestrian interactions, it is critical for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs)
to have the ability to predict pedestrians' short-term and immediate actions in
real-time. In recent years, various methods have been developed to study
estimating pedestrian behaviors for autonomous driving scenarios, but there is
a lack of clear definitions for pedestrian behaviors. In this work, the
literature gaps are investigated and a taxonomy is presented for pedestrian
behavior characterization. Further, a novel multi-task sequence to sequence
Transformer encoders-decoders (TF-ed) architecture is proposed for pedestrian
action and trajectory prediction using only ego vehicle camera observations as
inputs. The proposed approach is compared against an existing LSTM encoders
decoders (LSTM-ed) architecture for action and trajectory prediction. The
performance of both models is evaluated on the publicly available Joint
Attention Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset, CARLA simulation data as well as
real-time self-driving shuttle data collected on university campus. Evaluation
results illustrate that the proposed method reaches an accuracy of 81% on
action prediction task on JAAD testing data and outperforms the LSTM-ed by
7.4%, while LSTM counterpart performs much better on trajectory prediction task
for a prediction sequence length of 25 frames.