Bayesian Prediction of Future Street Scenes through Importance Sampling based Optimization

Abstract: For autonomous agents to successfully operate in the real world, anticipation of future events and states of their environment is a key competence. This problem can be formalized as a sequence prediction problem, where a number of observations are used to predict the sequence into the future. However, real-world scenarios demand a model of uncertainty of such predictions, as future states become increasingly uncertain and multi-modal -- in particular on long time horizons. This makes modelling and learning challenging. We cast state of the art semantic segmentation and future prediction models based on deep learning into a Bayesian formulation that in turn allows for a full Bayesian treatment of the prediction problem. We present a new sampling scheme for this model that draws from the success of variational autoencoders by incorporating a recognition network. In the experiments we show that our model outperforms prior work in accuracy of the predicted segmentation and provides calibrated probabilities that also better capture the multi-modal aspects of possible future states of street scenes.