Environment-Attention Network for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction

In vehicle trajectory prediction, the difficulty in modeling the interaction relationship between vehicles lies in constructing the interaction structure between the vehicles in the traffic scene. Majority of existing models only focus on the interaction between the historical trajectory of the vehicle and the surrounding vehicles in the spatial domain, and do not pay attention to the interaction between the vehicle and the non-Euclidean correlation structure (graph structure) that exists in the environment. In order to overcome the deficiencies in the existing models, this paper proposes the Environment-Attention Network model (EA-Net) to obtain the full interactive information between the vehicle and its driving environment. In the proposed model, a new type of parallel structure consisting of Graph Attention network (GAT) and Convolutional social pooling containing Squeeze-and-Extraction mechanism (SE-CS), is constructed as the environmental feature extraction module and embedded in LSTM encoder-decoder. This structure solves the limitation of the dimension and structure influence when constructing the interaction model between the vehicle and the surrounding environment, making the extracted feature information comprehensive and effective. The prediction accuracy of the model with the RMSE loss function is tested on two public datasets- NGSIM and highD, and compared with several state-of-the-art trajectory prediction algorithm models. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed Environment-Attention Network in the two datasets is more than 20% higher than that of the single structure model, which indicates that the proposed model proposed has superior performance and better adaptability to different traffic environments compared with the existing models.