Probabilistic trajectory prediction with Gaussian mixture models

In the context of driver assistance, an accurate and reliable prediction of the vehicle´s trajectory is beneficial. This can be useful either to increase the flexibility of comfort systems or, in the more interesting case, to detect potentially dangerous situations as early as possible. In this contribution, a novel approach for trajectory prediction is proposed which has the capability to predict the vehicle´s trajectory several seconds in advance, the so called long-term prediction. To achieve this, previously observed motion patterns are used to infer a joint probability distribution as motion model. Using this distribution, a trajectory can be predicted by calculating the probability for the future motion, conditioned on the current observed history motion pattern. The advantage of the probabilistic modeling is that the result is not only a prediction, but rather a whole distribution over the future trajectories and a specific prediction can be made by the evaluation of the statistical properties, e.g. the mean of this conditioned distribution. Additionally, an evaluation of the variance can be used to examine the reliability of the prediction.