Forecasting Interactive Dynamics of Pedestrians with Fictitious Play

We develop predictive models of pedestrian dynamics by encoding the coupled nature of multi-pedestrian interaction using game theory and deep learning-based visual analysis to estimate person-specific behavior parameters. We focus on predictive models since they are important for developing interactive autonomous systems (e.g., autonomous cars, home robots, smart homes) that can understand different human behavior and pre-emptively respond to future human actions. Building predictive models for multi-pedestrian interactions however, is very challenging due to two reasons: (1) the dynamics of interaction are complex interdependent processes, where the decision of one person can affect others, and (2) dynamics are variable, where each person may behave differently (e.g., an older person may walk slowly while the younger person may walk faster). To address these challenges, we utilize concepts from game theory to model the intertwined decision making process of multiple pedestrians and use visual classifiers to learn a mapping from pedestrian appearance to behavior parameters. We evaluate our proposed model on several public multiple pedestrian interaction video datasets. Results show that our strategic planning model predicts and explains human interactions 25% better when compared to a state-of-the-art activity forecasting method.