Hierarchical Multi-Supervision Multi-Interaction Graph Attention Network for Multi-Camera Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Pedestrian trajectory prediction has become an essential underpinning in various human-centric applications including but not limited to autonomous vehicles, intelligent surveillance system and social robotics. Previous research endeavors mainly focus on single camera trajectory prediction (SCTP), while the problem of multi-camera trajectory prediction (MCTP) is often overly simplified into predicting presence in the next camera. This paper addresses MCTP from a more realistic yet challenging perspective, by redefining the task as a joint estimation of both future destination and possible trajectory. As such, two major efforts are devoted to facilitating related research and advancing modeling techniques. Firstly, we establish a comprehensive multi-camera Scenes Pedestrian Trajectory Dataset (mcScenes), which is collected from a real-world multi-camera space combined with thorough human interaction annotations and carefully designed evaluation metrics. Secondly, we propose a novel joint prediction framework, namely HM3GAT, for the MCTP task by building a tailored network architecture. The core idea behind HM3GAT is a fusion of topological and trajectory information that are mutually beneficial to the prediction of each task, achieved by deeply customized networks. The proposed framework is comprehensively evaluated on the mcScenes dataset with multiple ablation experiments. Status-of-the-art SCTP models are adopted as baselines to further validate the advantages of our method in terms of both information fusion and technical improvement. The mcScenes dataset, the HM3GAT, and alternative models are made publicly available for interested readers.