WSiP: Wave Superposition Inspired Pooling for Dynamic Interactions-Aware Trajectory Prediction

Predicting motions of surrounding vehicles is critically important to help autonomous driving systems plan a safe path and avoid collisions. Although recent social pooling based LSTM models have achieved significant performance gains by considering the motion interactions between vehicles close to each other, vehicle trajectory prediction still remains as a challenging research issue due to the dynamic and high-order interactions in the real complex driving scenarios. To this end, we propose a wave superposition inspired social pooling (Wave-pooling for short) method for dynamically aggregating the high-order interactions from both local and global neighbor vehicles. Through modeling each vehicle as a wave with the amplitude and phase, Wave-pooling can more effectively represent the dynamic motion states of vehicles and capture their high-order dynamic interactions by wave superposition. By integrating Wave-pooling, an encoder-decoder based learning framework named WSiP is also proposed.

Extensive experiments conducted on two public highway datasets NGSIM and highD verify the effectiveness of WSiP by comparison with current state-of-the-art baselines. More importantly, the result of WSiP is more interpretable as the interaction strength between vehicles can be intuitively reflected by their phase difference. The code of the work is publicly available at https://github.com/Chopin0123/WSiP.