TrajFlow: Learning the Distribution over Trajectories

Predicting the future behavior of human road users remains an open challenge for the development of risk-aware autonomous vehicles. An important aspect of this challenge is effectively capturing the uncertainty inherent to human behavior. This paper proposes an approach for probabilistic trajectory prediction based on normalizing flows, which provides an analytical expression of the learned distribution. We reformulate the problem of capturing distributions over trajectories into capturing distributions over abstracted trajectory features using an autoencoder, simplifying the learning task of the normalizing flows. TrajFlow improves the calibration of the learned distributions while achieving predictive performance on par with or superior to state-of-the-art methods on the ETH/UCY and the rounD data set.