A Dual Learning Model for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction

Automated vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems require an accurate prediction of future traffic scene states. The tendency in recent years has been to use deep learning approaches for accurate trajectory prediction but these approaches suffer from computational complexity, dependency on a specific environment/dataset, and lack of insight into vehicle interactions. In this paper, we aim to address these limitations by proposing a Dual Learning Model (DLM) using lane occupancy and risk maps for vehicle trajectory prediction. To understand the spatial interactions of road users, make the model independent of the environment, and consider inter-vehicle distances, we embed an Occupancy Map (OM) into the trajectory prediction model. We also utilise a traffic scene Risk Map (RM) to explicitly consider a comprehensive definition of risk based on Time-to-Collision in the traffic scene. These two features employed in the encoder-decoder architecture improve system accuracy with less complexity and provide insight into the interaction between all road users. The experiment has been conducted on two different naturalistic highway driving datasets (i.e., NGSIM and HighD) demonstrating algorithm independence from a single environment. Comparison results indicate that the DLM achieves a more accurate trajectory prediction with a less complex structure compared with existing approaches in terms of RMS prediction error, which indicates the effectiveness of DLM in such a context.