Social LSTM: Human Trajectory Prediction in Crowded Spaces

Alexandre Alahi, Kratarth Goel, Vignesh Ramanathan, Alexandre Robicquet, Li Fei-Fei, Silvio Savarese; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 961-971

Humans navigate complex crowded environments based on social conventions: they respect personal space, yielding right-of-way and avoid collisions. In our work, we propose a data-driven approach to learn these human-human interactions for predicting their future trajectories. This is in contrast to traditional approaches which use hand-crafted functions such as Social forces. We present a new Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model which jointly reasons across multiple individuals in a scene. Different from the conventional LSTM, we share the information between multiple LSTMs through a new pooling layer. This layer pools the hidden representation from LSTMs corresponding to neighboring trajectories to capture interactions within this neighborhood. We demonstrate the performance of our method on several public datasets. Our model outperforms previous forecasting methods by more than 42% . We also analyze the trajectories predicted by our model to demonstrate social behaviours such as collision avoidance and group movement, learned by our model.