Early Pedestrian Intent Prediction via Features Estimation

Abstract

Anticipating human motion is an essential requirement for autonomous vehicles and robots in order to primary guarantee people's safety. In urban scenarios, they interact with humans, the surrounding environment, and other vehicles relying on several cues to forecast crossing or not crossing intentions. For these reasons, this challenging task is often tackled using both visual and non-visual features to anticipate future actions from 2 s to 1 s earlier the event. Our work primarily aims to revise this standard evaluation protocol to forecast crossing events as early as possible. To this end, we conceive a solution upon an extensively used model for egocentric action anticipation (RU-LSTM), proposing to envision future features, or modalities, that can better infer human intentions using a properly attention-based fusion mechanism. We validate our model against JAAD and PIE datasets and demonstrate that an intent prediction model can benefit from these additional clues for anticipating pedestrians crossing events.