text: This paper presents a novel deep learning framework for human trajectory prediction and detecting social group membership in crowds. We introduce a generative adversarial pipeline which preserves the spatio-temporal structure of the pedestrian's neighbourhood, enabling us to extract relevant attributes describing their social identity. We formulate the group detection task as an unsupervised learning problem, obviating the need for supervised learning of group memberships via hand labeled databases, allowing us to directly employ the proposed framework in different surveillance settings. We evaluate the proposed trajectory prediction and group detection frameworks on multiple public benchmarks, and for both tasks the proposed method demonstrates its capability to better anticipate human sociological behaviour compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.
  @cite_24: Pedestrians follow different trajectories to avoid obstacles and accommodate fellow pedestrians. Any autonomous vehicle navigating such a scene should be able to foresee the future positions of pedestrians and accordingly adjust its path to avoid collisions. This problem of trajectory prediction can be viewed as a sequence generation task, where we are interested in predicting the future trajectory of people based on their past positions. Following the recent success of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models for sequence prediction tasks, we propose an LSTM model which can learn general human movement and predict their future trajectories. This is in contrast to traditional approaches which use hand-crafted functions such as Social forces. We demonstrate the performance of our method on several public datasets. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on some of these datasets. We also analyze the trajectories predicted by our model to demonstrate the motion behaviour learned by our model.
  @cite_6: As humans we possess an intuitive ability for navigation which we master through years of practice; however existing approaches to model this trait for diverse tasks including monitoring pedestrian flow and detecting abnormal events have been limited by using a variety of hand-crafted features. Recent research in the area of deep-learning has demonstrated the power of learning features directly from the data; and related research in recurrent neural networks has shown exemplary results in sequence-to-sequence problems such as neural machine translation and neural image caption generation. Motivated by these approaches, we propose a novel method to predict the future motion of a pedestrian given a short history of their, and their neighbours, past behaviour. The novelty of the proposed method is the combined attention model which utilises both "soft attention" as well as "hard-wired" attention in order to map the trajectory information from the local neighbourhood to the future positions of the pedestrian of interest. We illustrate how a simple approximation of attention weights (i.e hard-wired) can be merged together with soft attention weights in order to make our model applicable for challenging real world scenarios with hundreds of neighbours. The navigational capability of the proposed method is tested on two challenging publicly available surveillance databases where our model outperforms the current-state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we illustrate how the proposed architecture can be directly applied for the task of abnormal event detection without handcrafting the features.
summary: One of the most popular deep learning methods is the social LSTM @cite_24 model which represents the pedestrians in the local neighbourhood using LSTMs and then generates their future trajectory by systematically pooling the relavant information. This removes the need for handcrafted features and learns the required feature vectors automatically through the encoded trajectory representation. This architecture is further augmented in @cite_6 where the authors propose a more efficient method to embed the local neighbourhood information via a soft and hardwired attention framework. They demonstrate the importance of fully capturing the context information, which includes the short-term history of the pedestrian of interest as well as their neighbours.