C2F-TP: A Coarse-to-Fine Denoising Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction

Abstract: Accurately predicting the trajectory of vehicles is critically important for ensuring safety and reliability in autonomous driving. Although considerable research efforts have been made recently, the inherent trajectory uncertainty caused by various factors including the dynamic driving intends and the diverse driving scenarios still poses significant challenges to accurate trajectory prediction. To address this issue, we propose C2F-TP, a coarse-to-fine denoising framework for uncertainty-aware vehicle trajectory prediction. C2F-TP features an innovative two-stage coarse-to-fine prediction process. Specifically, in the spatial-temporal interaction stage, we propose a spatial-temporal interaction module to capture the inter-vehicle interactions and learn a multimodal trajectory distribution, from which a certain number of noisy trajectories are sampled. Next, in the trajectory refinement stage, we design a conditional denoising model to reduce the uncertainty of the sampled trajectories through a step-wise denoising operation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets NGSIM and highD that are widely adopted in trajectory prediction. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal.