A Novel Multimodal Vehicle Path Prediction Method Based on Temporal Convolutional Networks

Abstract

Accurate and reliable prediction of future motions of the nearby agents and effective environment understanding will contribute to high-quality and meticulous path planning for the automated vehicles under uncertainty and guarantee traffic safety for future real-world deployments. This task becomes more challenging in highly dynamic and complex scenarios such as unsignalized intersections where no lights exist to control vehicles behavior, or there are not multiple lines for the vehicles to anticipate drivers’ future intentions based on the lane in which they are driving. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning-based methodology to anticipate vehicles path at unsignalized intersections. The method provides multimodal outputs to take into account the inherited uncertainty and multimodality nature of vehicles behavior. Our proposed model works based on dilated convolutional networks in combination with a mixture density layer. We then cluster various existing mixes into possible paths that are ranked based on probability. We assess the performance and generalization capability of our vehicle path prediction model using several metrics over a large naturalistic dataset containing more than 23800 vehicle trajectories. The obtained results reveal the higher performance of our path prediction approach compared with several baselines and benchmarks.