Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Based on Dual Social Graph Attention Network

Pedestrian trajectory prediction poses significant challenges for autonomous systems due to the intricate nature of social interactions in densely populated environments. While the existing methods frequently encounter difficulties in effectively quantifying the nuanced social relationships, we propose a novel dual social graph attention network (DSGAT) that systematically models multi-level interactions. This framework is specifically designed to enhance the extraction of pedestrian interaction features within the environment, thereby improving the trajectory prediction accuracy. The network architecture consists of two primary branches, namely an individual branch and a group branch, which are responsible for modeling personal and collective pedestrian behaviors, respectively. For individual feature modeling, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Weighted Graph Attention Network (STWGAT) branch, which incorporates a newly developed directed social attention function to explicitly capture both the direction and intensity of pedestrian interactions. This mechanism enables the model to more effectively represent the fine-grained social dynamics. Subsequently, leveraging the STWGAT’s processing of directed weighted graphs, the network’s ability to aggregate spatiotemporal information and refine individual interaction representations is further strengthened. To effectively account for the critical group dynamics, a dedicated group attention function is designed to identify and quantify the collective behaviors within pedestrian crowds. This facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the complex social interactions, leading to an enhanced trajectory prediction accuracy. Extensive comparative experiments conducted on the widely used ETH and UCY benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed network consistently surpasses the baseline methods across the key evaluation metrics, including the Average Displacement Error (ADE) and Final Displacement Error (FDE). These results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the DSGAT-based approach in handling complex pedestrian interaction scenarios.