Spatio-Temporal Scene-Graph Embedding for Autonomous Vehicle Collision Prediction

Abstract

In autonomous vehicles (AV), early warning systems rely on collision prediction to ensure occupant safety. However, state-of-the-art methods using deep convolutional networks either fail at modeling collisions or are too expensive/slow, making them less suitable for deployment on AV edge hardware. To address these limitations, we propose SG2VEC, a spatio-temporal scenegraph embedding methodology that uses Graph Neural Network (GNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers to predict future collisions via visual scene perception. We demonstrate that SG2VEC predicts collisions 8.11% more accurately and 39.07% earlier than the state-of-the-art method on synthesized datasets, and 29.47% more accurately on a challenging real-world collision dataset. We also show that SG2VEC is better than the state-ofthe-art at transferring knowledge from synthetic datasets to realworld driving datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that SG2VEC performs inference 9.3x faster with an 88.0% smaller model, 32.4% less power, and 92.8% less energy than the state-of-the-art method on the industry-standard Nvidia DRIVE PX 2 platform, making it more suitable for implementation on the edge.