skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: SocialVAE: Human Trajectory Prediction Using Timewise Latents
Predicting pedestrian movement is critical for human behavior analysis and also for safe and efficient human-agent interactions. However, despite significant advancements, it is still challenging for existing approaches to capture the uncertainty and multimodality of human navigation decision making. In this paper, we propose SocialVAE, a novel approach for human trajectory prediction. The core of SocialVAE is a timewise variational autoencoder architecture that exploits stochastic recurrent neural networks to perform prediction, combined with a social attention mechanism and a backward posterior approximation to allow for better extraction of pedestrian navigation strategies. We show that SocialVAE improves current state-of-the-art performance on several pedestrian trajectory prediction benchmarks, including the ETH/UCY benchmark, Stanford Drone Dataset, and SportVU NBA movement dataset.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2047632
PAR ID:
10404587
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Editor(s):
Avidan, S.; Brostow, G.; Cissé, M.; Farinella, G.M.; Hassner, T.
Date Published:
Journal Name:
European Conference on Computer Vision
Page Range / eLocation ID:
511-528
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Existing methods for pedestrian motion trajectory prediction are learning and predicting the trajectories in the 2D image space. In this work, we observe that it is much more efficient to learn and predict pedestrian trajectories in the 3D space since the human motion occurs in the 3D physical world and and their behavior patterns are better represented in the 3D space. To this end, we use a stereo camera system to detect and track the human pose with deep neural networks. During pose estimation, these twin deep neural networks satisfy the stereo consistence constraint. We adapt the existing SocialGAN method to perform pedestrian motion trajectory prediction from the 2D to the 3D space. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the pedestrian trajectory prediction performance, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. 
    more » « less
  2. Human trajectory prediction is critical for autonomous platforms like self-driving cars or social robots. We present a latent belief energy-based model (LB-EBM) for diverse human trajectory forecast. LB-EBM is a probabilistic model with cost function defined in the latent space to account for the movement history and social context. The low dimensionality of the latent space and the high expressivity of the EBM make it easy for the model to capture the multimodality of pedestrian trajectory distributions. LB-EBM is learned from expert demonstrations (i.e., human trajectories) projected into the latent space. Sampling from or optimizing the learned LB-EBM yields a belief vector which is used to make a path plan, which then in turn helps to predict a long-range trajectory. The effectiveness of LB-EBM and the two-step approach are supported by strong empirical results. Our model is able to make accurate, multi-modal, and social compliant trajectory predictions and improves over prior state-of-the-arts performance on the Stanford Drone trajectory prediction benchmark by 10:9% and on the ETH-UCY benchmark by 27:6%. 
    more » « less
  3. This work studies the problem of predicting human intent to interact with a robot in a public environment. To facilitate research in this problem domain, we first contribute the People Approaching Robots Database (PAR-D), a new collection of datasets for intent prediction in Human-Robot Interaction. The database includes a subset of the ATC Approach Trajectory dataset [28] with augmented ground truth labels. It also includes two new datasets collected with a robot photographer on two locations of a university campus. Then, we contribute a novel human-annotated baseline for predicting intent. Our results suggest that the robot’s environment and the amount of time that a person is visible impacts human performance in this prediction task. We also provide computational baselines for intent prediction in PAR-D by comparing the performance of several machine learning models, including ones that directly model pedestrian interaction intent and others that predict motion trajectories as an intermediary step. From these models, we find that trajectory prediction seems useful for inferring intent to interact with a robot in a public environment. 
    more » « less
  4. We focus on the problem of planning the motion of a robot in a dynamic multiagent environment such as a pedestrian scene. Enabling the robot to navigate safely and in a socially compliant fashion in such scenes requires a representation that accounts for the unfolding multiagent dynamics. Existing approaches to this problem tend to employ microscopic models of motion prediction that reason about the individual behavior of other agents. While such models may achieve high tracking accuracy in trajectory prediction benchmarks, they often lack an understanding of the group structures unfolding in crowded scenes. Inspired by the Gestalt theory from psychology, we build a Model Predictive Control framework (G-MPC) that leverages group-based prediction for robot motion planning. We conduct an extensive simulation study involving a series of challenging navigation tasks in scenes extracted from two real-world pedestrian datasets. We illustrate that G-MPC enables a robot to achieve statistically significantly higher safety and lower number of group intrusions than a series of baselines featuring individual pedestrian motion prediction models. Finally, we show that G-MPC can handle noisy lidar-scan estimates without significant performance losses. 
    more » « less
  5. Understanding pedestrian behavior patterns is key for building autonomous agents that can navigate among humans. We seek a learned dictionary of pedestrian behavior to obtain a semantic description of pedestrian trajectories. Supervised methods for dictionary learning are often impractical since pedestrian behaviors may be unknown a priori and manually generating behavior labels is prohibitively time consuming. We utilize a novel, unsupervised framework to create a taxonomy of pedestrian behavior observed in a specific space. First, we learn a trajectory latent space that enables unsupervised clustering to create an interpretable pedestrian behavior dictionary. Then, we show the utility of this dictionary for building pedestrian behavior maps to visualize space usage patterns and for computing distributions of behaviors in a space. We demonstrate a simple but effective trajectory prediction by conditioning on these behavior labels. While many trajectory analysis methods rely on RNNs or transformers, we develop a lightweight, low-parameter approach and show results outperforming SOTA on the ETH and UCY datasets. 
    more » « less