Visual Sensor-Based Trajectory Multimodality Prediction via Anchor-Free Query Attention Network

As a core component of intelligent surveillance and autonomous driving systems, visual sensor-based trajectory multimodality prediction can significantly improve their perception and decision-making capabilities. Numerous existing trajectory prediction methods are dedicated to enhance prediction performance. However, they still fail to effectively model the complex spatiotemporal interactions among pedestrians and trajectory multimodality. To address the above challenges, this article presents one new trajectory multimodality prediction method via anchor-free query-based attention network, which can more effectively capture spatiotemporal interactions and model trajectory multimodality. First, the initial trajectory proposal module employs target-centered query-based attention to capture complex spatiotemporal interactions and generate multiple trajectory proposals corresponding to the multiple modes of the future trajectory, which allows the model to use different interaction information when decoding trajectory points at different time steps. Second, the novel trajectory refinement module utilizes the learnable trajectory proposals to construct proposal-level interaction mechanisms to refine future trajectories. Experimental results conducted on ETH and UCY datasets demonstrate that the proposed model can provide the state-of-the-art prediction performance.