Graph Convolution Networks for Probabilistic Modeling of Driving Acceleration

The ability to model and predict ego-vehicle’s surrounding traffic is crucial for autonomous pilots and intelligent driver-assistance systems. Acceleration prediction is important as one of the major components of traffic prediction. This paper proposes novel approaches to the acceleration prediction problem. By representing spatial relationships between vehicles with a graph model, we build a generalized acceleration prediction framework. This paper studies the effectiveness of proposed Graph Convolution Networks, which operate on graphs predicting the acceleration distribution for vehicles driving on highways. We further investigate prediction improvement through integrating of Recurrent Neural Networks to disentangle the temporal complexity inherent in the traffic data. Results from simulation with comprehensive performance metrics support that our proposed networks outperform state-of-the-art methods in generating realistic trajectories over a prediction horizon.