HGSCO: Heterogeneous Graph Structure Contrast Optimization for Trajectory Prediction

Predicting and planning the future trajectories of various traffic participants is an important task with multiple applications, including autonomous vehicles, service robots, and intelligent transportation. However, the diversity of heterogeneous agents including pedestrians, bicycles, and vehicles in traffic scenarios presents substantial challenges to this task. Current models do not fully capture the implicit and explicit interaction relationships among these heterogeneous agents and often overlook the significance of extracting implicit correlations from agent features. To address these issues, we introduce a novel model for trajectory prediction: Heterogeneous Graph Structure Contrast Optimization (HGSCO). To accurately capture the interaction relationships among heterogeneous agents, HGSCO constructs semantic graph structures representing implicit relationships and meta-path graph structures representing explicit relationships. Then, HGSCO introduces a cross-view contrastive learning approach, which optimizes the heterogeneous graph structure by maximizing mutual information between the two types of graph structures. The model can provide precise interaction relationships among heterogeneous agents by effectively fusing these two graph representations with a gated fusion method. We utilized video data captured by camera sensors in complex environments with multiple agents to conduct experiments. Our proposed model achieved an 11.5% and 6.7% reduction in Average Displacement Error (ADE) across these datasets, respectively, and a reduction of 15.6% and 8.1% in Final Displacement Error (FDE). The results demonstrate that HGSCO significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods regarding trajectory prediction accuracy.