SIMF: Semantics-aware Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles require motion forecasting of their surrounding multi-agents (pedestrians and vehicles) to make optimal decisions for navigation. The existing methods focus on techniques to utilize the positions and velocities of these agents and fail to capture semantic information from the scene. Moreover, to mitigate the increase in computational complexity associated with the number of agents in the scene, some works leverage Euclidean distance to prune far-away agents. However, distance-based metric alone is insufficient to select relevant agents and accurately perform their predictions. To resolve these issues, we propose Semantics-aware Interactive Motion Forecasting (SIMF) method to capture semantics along with spatial information, and optimally select relevant agents for motion prediction. Specifically, we achieve this by implementing a semantic-aware selection of relevant agents from the scene and passing them through an attention mechanism to extract global encodings. These encodings along with agents' local information are passed through an encoder to obtain time-dependent latent variables for a motion policy predicting the future trajectories. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and provides more accurate predictions in a scene-consistent manner.