Impact of Perception Errors in Vision-Based Detection and Tracking Pipelines on Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving Systems

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for developing collision avoidance algorithms in autonomous driving systems, aiming to predict the future movement of the detected pedestrians based on their past trajectories. The traditional methods for pedestrian trajectory prediction involve a sequence of tasks, including detection and tracking to gather the historical movement of the observed pedestrians. Consequently, the accuracy of trajectory prediction heavily relies on the accuracy of the detection and tracking models, making it susceptible to their performance. The prior research in trajectory prediction has mainly assessed the model performance using public datasets, which often overlook the errors originating from detection and tracking models. This oversight fails to capture the real-world scenario of inevitable detection and tracking inaccuracies. In this study, we investigate the cumulative effect of errors within integrated detection, tracking, and trajectory prediction pipelines. Through empirical analysis, we examine the errors introduced at each stage of the pipeline and assess their collective impact on the trajectory prediction accuracy. We evaluate these models across various custom datasets collected in Taiwan to provide a comprehensive assessment. Our analysis of the results derived from these integrated pipelines illuminates the significant influence of detection and tracking errors on downstream tasks, such as trajectory prediction and distance estimation.