Motion Perceiver: Real-Time Occupancy Forecasting for Embedded Systems

Abstract: This work introduces a novel and adaptable architecture designed for real-time occupancy forecasting that outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset in Soft IOU. The proposed model uses recursive latent state estimation with learned transformer-based functions to effectively update and evolve the state. This enables highly efficient real-time inference on embedded systems, as profiled on an Nvidia Xavier AGX. Our model, MotionPerceiver, achieves this by encoding a scene into a latent state that evolves in time through self-attention mechanisms. Additionally, it incorporates relevant scene observations, such as traffic signals, road topology and agent detections, through cross-attention mechanisms. This forms an efficient data-streaming architecture, that contrasts with the expensive, fixed-sequence input common in existing models. The architecture also offers the distinct advantage of generating occupancy predictions through localized querying based on a point-of-interest, as opposed to generating fixed-size occupancy images that render potentially irrelevant regions.