Human Trajectory Prediction with Momentary Observation

Human trajectory prediction task aims to analyze human future movements given their past status, which is a crucial step for many autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and social robots. In real-world scenarios, it is unlikely to obtain sufficiently long observations at all times for prediction, considering inevitable factors such as tracking losses and sudden events. However, the problem of trajectory pre-diction with limited observations has not drawn much at-tention in previous work. In this paper, we study a task named momentary trajectory prediction, which reduces the observed history from a long time sequence to an extreme situation of two frames, one frame for social and scene contexts and both frames for the velocity of agents. We perform a rigorous study of existing state-of-the-art approaches in this challenging setting on two widely used benchmarks. We further propose a unified feature extractor, along with a novel pre-training mechanism, to capture effective infor-mation within the momentary observation. Our extractor can be adopted in existing prediction models and substan-tially boost their performance of momentary trajectory pre-diction. We hope our work will pave the way for more re-sponsive, precise and robust prediction approaches, an important step toward real-world autonomous systems.