TrajAR: Long-Term Trajectory Prediction at Urban Intersections via Multi-scale Interaction Perception

Abstract

Accurate trajectory prediction of multiple road users at urban intersections--including motorized and nonmotorized vehicles and pedestrians--is critical for cooperative vehicle-infrastructure systems and intelligent transportation systems. This study focuses on multiple road users' trajectory prediction in urban intersections. Such predictions face two key challenges: modeling interactions among multiple road users in complex scenarios and achieving accurate long-term prediction. Existing solutions inadequately incorporate these interactions and suffer from error accumulation or overall bias when performing long-term prediction. To overcome these challenges, we propose a long-term Trajectory prediction multi-scale AutoRegressive framework (TrajAR), which follows an encoder-decoder structure. The encoder dynamically perceives road users' motion trends, types, signals, and implicit interactions for effective handling of complex scenarios. The decoder employs a multi-scale prediction strategy that progressively refines the predicted trajectory from coarse to fine scales, where coarse-scale predictions establish long-term path backbones and finer scales enhance precision. These designs allow TrajAR to achieve accurate long-term prediction in real-world scenarios, demonstrated through experiments on four real-world urban datasets from different intersections. Our results show an average improvement of 23.8%. We provide the code of TrajAR at https://github.com/LetianGong/TrajAR.