Handling Occlusion using Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract: Occlusion is a frequently occuring challenge in vision systems for autonomous driving. The density of objects in the field-of-view of the vehicle may be so high that some objects are only visible intermittently. It is therefore beneficial to investigate ways to predict the paths of objects under occlusion. In this thesis, we investigate whether trajectory prediction methods can be used to solve the occlusion prediction problem. We investigate two different types of approaches, one based on motion models, and one based on machine learning models. Furthermore, we investigate whether these two approaches can be fused to produce an even more reliable model. We evaluate our models on a pedestrian trajectory prediction dataset, an autonomous driving dataset, and a subset of the autonomous driving dataset that only includes validation examples of occlusion. The comparison of our different approaches shows that pure motion model-based methods perform the worst out of the three. On the other hand, machine learning-based models perform better, yet they require additional computing resources for training. Finally, the fused method performs the best on both the driving dataset and the occlusion data. Our results also indicate that trajectory prediction methods, both motion model-based and learning-based ones, can indeed accurately predict the path of occluded objects up to at least 3 seconds in the autonomous driving scenario.