Location-Velocity Attention for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Pedestrian path forecasting is crucial in applications such as smart video surveillance. It is a challenging task because of the complex crowd movement patterns in the scenes. Most of existing state-of-the-art LSTM based prediction methods require rich context like labelled static obstacles, labelled entrance/exit regions and even the background scene. Furthermore, incorporating contextual information into trajectory prediction increases the computational overhead and decreases the generalization of the prediction models across different scenes. In this paper, we propose a joint Location-Velocity Attention LSTM based method to predict trajectories. Specifically, a module is designed to tweak the LSTM network and an attention mechanism is trained to learn to optimally combine the location and the velocity information of pedestrians in the prediction process. We have evaluated our approach against other baselines and state-of-the-art methods on several publicly available datasets. The results show that it not only outperforms other prediction methods but it also has a good generalization ability.