Self-Supervised Simultaneous Multi-Step Prediction of Road Dynamics and Cost Map

While supervised learning is widely used for perception modules in conventional autonomous driving solutions, scalability is hindered by the huge amount of data labeling needed. In contrast, while end-to-end architectures do not require labeled data and are potentially more scalable, interpretability is sacrificed. We introduce a novel architecture that is trained in a fully self-supervised fashion for simultaneous multi-step prediction of space-time cost map and road dynamics. Our solution replaces the manually designed cost function for motion planning with a learned high dimensional cost map that is naturally interpretable and allows diverse contextual information to be integrated without manual data labeling. Experiments on real world driving data show that our solution leads to lower number of collisions and road violations in long planning horizons in comparison to baselines, demonstrating the feasibility of fully self-supervised prediction without sacrificing either scalability or interpretability.

Prediction by Anticipation: An Action-Conditional Prediction Method based on Interaction Learning

In autonomous driving (AD), accurately predicting changes in the environment can effectively improve safety and comfort. Due to complex interactions among traffic participants, however, it is very hard to achieve accurate prediction for a long horizon. To address this challenge, we propose prediction by anticipation, which views interaction in terms of a latent probabilistic generative process wherein some vehicles move partly in response to the anticipated motion of other vehicles. Under this view, consecutive data frames can be factorized into sequential samples from an action-conditional distribution that effectively generalizes to a wider range of actions and driving situations. Our proposed prediction model, variational Bayesian in nature, is trained to maximize the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of the log-likelihood of this conditional distribution. Evaluations of our approach with prominent AD datasets NGSIM I-80 and Argoverse show significant improvement over current state-of-the-art in both accuracy and generalization.

Bifold and Semantic Reasoning for Pedestrian Behavior Prediction

Pedestrian behavior prediction is one of the major challenges for intelligent driving systems. Pedestrians often exhibit complex behaviors influenced by various contextual elements. To address this problem, we propose BiPed, a multitask learning framework that simultaneously predicts trajectories and actions of pedestrians by relying on multimodal data. Our method benefits from 1) a bifold encoding approach where different data modalities are processed independently allowing them to develop their own representations, and jointly to produce a representation for all modalities using shared parameters; 2) a novel interaction modeling technique that relies on categorical semantic parsing of the scenes to capture interactions between target pedestrians and their surroundings; and 3) a bifold prediction mechanism that uses both independent and shared decoding of multimodal representations. Using public pedestrian behavior benchmark datasets for driving, PIE and JAAD, we highlight the benefits of the proposed method for behavior prediction and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves trajectory and action prediction by up to 22% and 9% respectively. We further investigate the contributions of the proposed reasoning techniques via extensive ablation studies.

Multi-Modal Hybrid Architecture for Pedestrian Action Prediction

Pedestrian behavior prediction is one of the major challenges for intelligent driving systems in urban environments. Pedestrians often exhibit a wide range of behaviors and adequate interpretations of those depend on various sources of information such as pedestrian appearance, states of other road users, the environment layout, etc. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-modal prediction algorithm that incorporates different sources of information captured from the environment to predict future crossing actions of pedestrians. The proposed model benefits from a hybrid learning architecture consisting of feedforward and recurrent networks for analyzing visual features of the environment and dynamics of the scene. Using the existing 2D pedestrian behavior benchmarks and a newly annotated 3D driving dataset, we show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in pedestrian crossing prediction.

Multi-Step Prediction of Occupancy Grid Maps with Recurrent Neural Networks

We investigate the multi-step prediction of the drivable space, represented by Occupancy Grid Maps (OGMs), for autonomous vehicles. Our motivation is that accurate multi-step prediction of the drivable space can efficiently improve path planning and navigation resulting in safe, comfortable and optimum paths in autonomous driving. We train a variety of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based architectures on the OGM sequences from the KITTI dataset. The results demonstrate significant improvement of the prediction accuracy using our proposed difference learning method, incorporating motion related features, over the state of the art. We remove the egomotion from the OGM sequences by transforming them into a common frame. Although in the transformed sequences the KITTI dataset is heavily biased toward static objects, by learning the difference between subsequent OGMs, our proposed method provides accurate prediction over both the static and moving objects.