S2TNet: Spatio-Temporal Transformer Networks for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving

To safely and rationally participate in dense and heterogeneous traffic, autonomous vehicles require to sufficiently analyze the motion patterns of surrounding traffic-agents and accurately predict their future trajectories. This is challenging because the trajectories of traffic-agents are not only influenced by the traffic-agents themselves but also by spatial interaction with each other. Previous methods usually rely on the sequential step-by-step processing of Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and merely extract the interactions between spatial neighbors for single type traffic-agents. We propose the Spatio-Temporal Transformer Networks (S2TNet), which models the spatio-temporal interactions by spatio-temporal Transformer and deals with the temporel sequences by temporal Transformer. We input additional category, shape and heading information into our networks to handle the heterogeneity of traffic-agents. The proposed methods outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ApolloScape Trajectory dataset by more than 7% on both the weighted sum of Average and Final Displacement Error.