Synthetic Data Generation Framework, Dataset, and Efficient Deep Model for Pedestrian Intention Prediction

Muhammad Naveed Riaz, Maciej Wielgosz, Abel Garcia Romera, Antonio M. López

Abstract: Pedestrian intention prediction is crucial for autonomous driving. In particular, knowing if pedestrians are going to cross in front of the ego-vehicle is core to performing safe and comfortable maneuvers. Creating accurate and fast models that predict such intentions from sequential images is challenging. A factor contributing to this is the lack of datasets with diverse crossing and non-crossing (C/NC) scenarios. We address this scarceness by introducing a framework, named ARCANE, which allows programmatically generating synthetic datasets consisting of C/NC video clip samples. As an example, we use ARCANE to generate a large and diverse dataset named PedSynth. We will show how PedSynth complements widely used real-world datasets such as JAAD and PIE, so enabling more accurate models for C/NC prediction. Considering the onboard deployment of C/NC prediction models, we also propose a deep model named PedGNN, which is fast and has a very low memory footprint. PedGNN is based on a GNN-GRU architecture that takes a sequence of pedestrian skeletons as input to predict crossing intentions. ARCANE, PedSynth, and PedGNN is publicly released 1 1 https://github.com/NomiMalik0207/PedSynth-and-PedGNN-for-Pedestrian-Intention-Prediction.