STIGCN: spatial–temporal interaction-aware graph convolution network for pedestrian trajectory prediction

Accurately predicting the future trajectory of pedestrians is critical for tasks such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. Previous methods for pedestrian trajectory prediction dealt with social interaction and pedestrian movement factors either concurrently or sequentially, neglecting the link between them. Therefore, a spatial–temporal interaction-aware graph convolution network (STIGCN) is proposed for pedestrian trajectory prediction. STIGCN considers the correlation between social interaction and pedestrian movement factors to achieve more accurate interaction modeling. Specifically, we first constructed spatial and temporal graphs to model social interactions and movement factors. Then, we designed the spatial–temporal interaction-aware learning to utilize the spatial interaction features of each moment to assist the temporal interaction modeling and utilize the temporal interaction features of each pedestrian to assist the spatial interaction modeling, resulting in more accurate interaction modeling. Finally, a time-extrapolator pyramid convolution neural network (TEP-CNN) is designed to jointly estimate the two-dimensional Gaussian distribution parameters of future trajectories by combining the prediction features from multiple layers. Experimental results on two benchmark pedestrian trajectory prediction datasets show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of average displacement error and final displacement error and achieves more accurate predictions for pedestrian motions such as convergence and encounter.