A Hierarchical Framework for Interactive Behaviour Prediction of Heterogeneous Traffic Participants Based on Graph Neural Network

In complex and dynamic urban traffic scenarios, the accurate prediction of trajectories of surrounding traffic participants (vehicles, pedestrians, etc) with interactive behaviours plays an important role in the navigation and the motion planning of the ego vehicle. In this paper, based on the graph neural network (GNN), we propose a hierarchical GNN framework to model interactions of heterogeneous traffic participants (vehicles, pedestrians and riders) combined with LSTM to predict their trajectories. The proposed framework consists of two modules with two GNNs for interactive events recognition (IER) and trajectory prediction (TP). The IER module is used to recognise interactive events between traffic participants and the ego vehicle. With the recognised results as the input, the TP module is built for interactive trajectory prediction. In addition, to realise the multi-step prediction, a long short-term memory network (LSTM) is combined with GNN in the TP module. The proposed hierarchical framework is verified by the naturalistic driving data collected from the urban traffic environment. Comparative results with state-of-the-art methods indicate that the hierarchical GNN framework obtains an outstanding performance in the recognition of interactive events and the prediction of interactive behaviours.