Where Do You Go? Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction using Scene Features

Accurate prediction of pedestrian trajectories is crucial for enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles and reducing traffic fatalities involving pedestrians. While numerous studies have focused on modeling interactions among pedestrians to forecast their movements, the influence of environmental factors and scene-object placements has been comparatively underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel trajectory prediction model that integrates both pedestrian interactions and environmental context to improve prediction accuracy. Our approach captures spatial and temporal interactions among pedestrians within a sparse graph framework. To account for pedestrian-scene interactions, we employ advanced image enhancement and semantic segmentation techniques to extract detailed scene features. These scene and interaction features are then fused through a cross-attention mechanism, enabling the model to prioritize relevant environmental factors that influence pedestrian movements. Finally, a temporal convolutional network processes the fused features to predict future pedestrian trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving ADE and FDE values of 0.252 and 0.372 meters, respectively, underscoring the importance of incorporating both social interactions and environmental context in pedestrian trajectory prediction.

Neural Error Covariance Estimation for Precise LiDAR Localization

Autonomous vehicles have gained significant attention due to technological advancements and their potential to transform transportation. A critical challenge in this domain is precise localization, particularly in LiDAR-based map matching, which is prone to errors due to degeneracy in the data. Most sensor fusion techniques, such as the Kalman filter, rely on accurate error covariance estimates for each sensor to improve localization accuracy. However, obtaining reliable covariance values for map matching remains a complex task. To address this challenge, we propose a neural network-based framework for predicting localization error covariance in LiDAR map matching. To achieve this, we introduce a novel dataset generation method specifically designed for error covariance estimation. In our evaluation using a Kalman filter, we achieved a 2 cm improvement in localization accuracy, a significant enhancement in this domain.

LiDAR-Camera Fusion for Video Panoptic Segmentation without Video Training

Panoptic segmentation, which combines instance and semantic segmentation, has gained a lot of attention in autonomous vehicles, due to its comprehensive representation of the scene. This task can be applied for cameras and LiDAR sensors, but there has been a limited focus on combining both sensors to enhance image panoptic segmentation (PS). Although previous research has acknowledged the benefit of 3D data on camera-based scene perception, no specific study has explored the influence of 3D data on image and video panoptic segmentation (VPS).This work seeks to introduce a feature fusion module that enhances PS and VPS by fusing LiDAR and image data for autonomous vehicles. We also illustrate that, in addition to this fusion, our proposed model, which utilizes two simple modifications, can further deliver even more high-quality VPS without being trained on video data. The results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both the image and video panoptic segmentation evaluation metrics by up to 5 points.

How far should self-driving cars see? Effect of observation range on vehicle self-localization

Accuracy and time efficiency are two essential requirements for the self-localization of autonomous vehicles. While the observation range considered for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has a significant effect on both accuracy and computation time, its effect is not well investigated in the literature. In this paper, we will answer the question: How far should a driverless car observe during self-localization? We introduce a framework to dynamically define the observation range for localization to meet the accuracy requirement for autonomous driving, while keeping the computation time low. To model the effect of scanning range on the localization accuracy for every point on the map, several map factors were employed. The capability of the proposed framework was verified using field data, demonstrating that it is able to improve the average matching time from 142.2 ms to 39.3 ms while keeping the localization accuracy around 8.1 cm.