Social-STGMLP: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Multi-Layer Perceptron for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Abstract

As autonomous driving technology advances, the imperative of ensuring pedestrian traffic safety becomes increasingly prominent within the design framework of autonomous driving systems. Pedestrian trajectory prediction stands out as a pivotal technology aiming to address this challenge by striving to precisely forecast pedestrians’ future trajectories, thereby enabling autonomous driving systems to execute timely and accurate decisions. However, the prevailing state-of-the-art models often rely on intricate structures and a substantial number of parameters, posing challenges in meeting the imperative demand for lightweight models within autonomous driving systems. To address these challenges, we introduce Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Multi-Layer Perceptron (Social-STGMLP), a novel approach that utilizes solely fully connected layers and layer normalization. Social-STGMLP operates by abstracting pedestrian trajectories into a spatio-temporal graph, facilitating the modeling of both the spatial social interaction among pedestrians and the temporal motion tendency inherent to pedestrians themselves. Our evaluation of Social-STGMLP reveals its superiority over the reference method, as evidenced by experimental results indicating reductions of 5% in average displacement error (ADE) and 17% in final displacement error (FDE).