Graph-Based Spatial-Temporal Convolutional Network for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Forecasting the trajectories of neighbor vehicles is a crucial step for decision making and motion planning of autonomous vehicles. This paper proposes a graph-based spatial-temporal convolutional network (GSTCN) to predict future trajectory distributions of all neighbor vehicles using past trajectories. This network tackles spatial interactions using a graph convolutional network (GCN), and captures temporal features with a convolutional neural network (CNN). The spatial-temporal features are encoded and decoded by a gated recurrent unit (GRU) network to generate future trajectory distributions. Besides, we propose a weighted adjacency matrix to describe the intensities of mutual influence between vehicles, and the ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our scheme. Our network is evaluated on two real-world freeway trajectory datasets: I-80 and US-101 in the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM). Comparisons in three aspects, including prediction errors, model sizes, and inference speeds, show that our network can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a graph-based spatial-temporal convolutional network (GSTCN) to predict future trajectory distributions of neighbor vehicles. The network combines graph convolutional network (GCN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) to capture spatial interactions and temporal features between vehicles, resulting in accurate trajectory predictions.