Deep-Learning Based Decentralized Frame-to-Frame Trajectory Prediction over Binary Range-Angle Maps for Automotive Radars

Reliable trajectory prediction methods are critical in providing predictive safety intelligence for vital decision making in intelligent transportation systems to further enhance the safety of drivers and passengers. To tackle complicated maneuvering and interactions between objects, learning-based algorithms were used to replace classic model-based trajectory prediction algorithms. However, most algorithms implicitly presume that they are executed at centralized processing units after gathering data from edge sensors and delivering the results back to the on-board units. This causes an increase in computation time and latency; thus, reducing the reaction time of the drivers. To reduce the computation time and latency and consider the robustness of local sensors, we propose a decentralized radar-dedicated framework with a deep-learning (DL) model, called predictive RadarNet, to predict future trajectories over binary range angle (RA) maps with a probabilistic representation according to the original radar RA maps for presenting the uncertainty of the estimated trajectories. In addition, to reduce the model size for low-complexity, we designed a prepossessing technique that can largely reduce the size of the input tensors without losing information. Moreover, we found that the functions of the DL-model consist of two operations: future inference of original radar RA maps and transformation to binary RA maps. Thus, we designed two models with different kernels that are suitable for dealing with the two operations. Simulations show that the proposed decentralized framework using predictive RadarNet can provide reliable prediction results with a low computation time.