Hierarchical Motion Encoder-Decoder Network for Trajectory Forecasting

Trajectory forecasting plays a pivotal role in the field of intelligent vehicles or social robots. Recent works focus on modeling spatial social impacts or temporal motion attentions, but neglect inherent properties of motions, i.e. moving trends and driving intentions. This paper proposes a context-free Hierarchical Motion Encoder-Decoder Network (HMNet) for vehicle trajectory prediction. HMNet first infers the hierarchical difference on motions to encode physically compliant patterns with high expressivity of moving trends and driving intentions. Then, a goal (endpoint)-embedded decoder hierarchically constructs multimodal predictions depending on the location-velocity-acceleration-related patterns. Besides, we present a modified social pooling module which considers certain motion properties to represent social interactions. HMNet enables to make the accurate, unimodal/multimodal and physically-socially-compliant prediction. Experiments on three public trajectory prediction datasets, i.e. NGSIM, HighD and Interaction show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. We will release our code here: https://github.com/xuedashuai/HMNet.