As autonomous driving technology matures, safety and robustness of its key components, including trajectory prediction, is vital. Though real-world datasets, such as Waymo Open Motion, provide realistic recorded scenarios for model development, they often lack truly safety-critical situations. Rather than utilizing unrealistic simulation or dangerous real-world testing, we instead propose a framework to characterize such datasets and find hidden safety-relevant scenarios within. Our approach expands the spectrum of safety-relevance, allowing us to study trajectory prediction models under a safety-informed, distribution shift setting. We contribute a generalized scenario characterization method, a novel scoring scheme to find subtly-avoided risky scenarios, and an evaluation of trajectory prediction models in this setting. We further contribute a remediation strategy, achieving a 10% average reduction in prediction collision rates. To facilitate future research, we release our code to the public: github.com/cmubig/SafeShift

Predicting pedestrian motion is essential for developing socially-aware robots that interact in a crowded environment. While the natural visual perspective for a social interaction setting is an egocentric view, the majority of existing work in trajectory prediction therein has been investigated purely in the top-down trajectory space. To support first-person view trajectory prediction research, we present T2FPV, a method for constructing high-fidelity first-person view (FPV) datasets given a real-world, top-down trajectory dataset; we showcase our approach on the ETH/UCY pedestrian dataset to generate the egocentric visual data of all interacting pedestrians, creating the T2FPV-ETH dataset. In this setting, FPV-specific errors arise due to imperfect detection and tracking, occlusions, and field-of-view (FOV) limitations of the camera. To address these errors, we propose CoFE, a module that further refines the imputation of missing data in an end-to-end manner with trajectory forecasting algorithms. Our method reduces the impact of such FPV errors on downstream prediction performance, decreasing displacement error by more than 10% on average. To facilitate research engagement, we release our T2FPV-ETH dataset and software tools.

To understand the real-world, it is essential to perceive in all-day conditions including cases which are not suitable for RGB sensors, especially at night. Beyond these limitations, the innovation introduced here is a multispectral solution in the form of depth estimation from a thermal sensor without an additional depth sensor.Based on an analysis of multispectral properties and the relevance to depth predictions, we propose an efficient and novel multi-task framework called the Multispectral Transfer Network (MTN) to estimate a depth image from a single thermal image. By exploiting geometric priors and chromaticity clues, our model can generate a pixel-wise depth image in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, we propose a new type of multitask module called Interleaver as a means of incorporating the chromaticity and fine details of skip-connections into the depth estimation framework without sharing feature layers. Lastly, we explain a novel technical means of stably training and covering large disparities and extending thermal images to data-driven methods for all-day conditions. In experiments, we demonstrate the better performance and generalization of depth estimation through the proposed multispectral stereo dataset, including various driving conditions.