A multi-modal vehicle trajectory prediction framework via conditional diffusion model: A coarse-to-fine approach

Abstract

Accurate prediction of the future motion of surrounding vehicles is crucial for ensuring the safety of motion planning in autonomous vehicles. However, it is challenging to perform because of the complex interactions between vehicles. In this study, we propose a novel multi-modal vehicle trajectory prediction framework that utilizes a coarse-to-fine approach by first generating initial trajectory proposals with a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and then refining them using the conditional diffusion model. We first address the problems of data sparsity and irregularity by converting the trajectory coordinates to the Frenet coordinate system. To enable the model to better distinguish between different features, we employ a temporal encoder to extract trajectory features and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to extract lane features. The target lane evaluator is utilized to calculate the attention weights for each lane candidate, thereby generating more deterministic future trajectories. We then use the CVAE to generate initial multiple trajectory proposals based on the surrounding scene context and the trajectory features of the target vehicle. Finally, we formulate the trajectory refinement task as a reverse process of the conditional diffusion model, which effectively enhances the multi-modal trajectory proposals. Experiments conducted on Argoverse and nuScenes demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in some evaluation metrics while achieving the optimal trade-off between predictive accuracy and efficiency. Field experiments conducted in urban environments further validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.