Drowned out by the noise: Evidence for Tracking-free Motion Prediction

Autonomous driving consists of a multitude of interacting modules, where each module must contend with errors from the others. Typically, the motion prediction module depends on a robust tracking system to capture each agent's past movement. In this work, we systematically explore the importance of the tracking module for the motion prediction task and ultimately conclude that the tracking module is detrimental to overall motion prediction performance when the module is imperfect (with as low as 1% error). We explicitly compare models that use tracking information to models that do not across multiple scenarios and conditions. We find that the tracking information only improves performance in noise-free conditions. A noise-free tracker is unlikely to remain noise-free in real-world scenarios, and the inevitable noise will subsequently negatively affect performance. We thus argue future work should be mindful of noise when developing and testing motion/tracking modules, or that they should do away with the tracking component entirely.