Occlusion-Aware Diffusion Model for Pedestrian Intention Prediction

Predicting pedestrian crossing intentions is crucial for the navigation of mobile robots and intelligent vehicles. Although recent deep learning-based models have shown significant success in forecasting intentions, few consider incomplete observation under occlusion scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose an Occlusion-Aware Diffusion Model (ODM) that reconstructs occluded motion patterns and leverages them to guide future intention prediction. During the denoising stage, we introduce an occlusion-aware diffusion transformer architecture to estimate noise features associated with occluded patterns, thereby enhancing the model’s ability to capture contextual relationships in occluded semantic scenarios. Furthermore, an occlusion mask-guided reverse process is introduced to effectively utilize observation information, reducing the accumulation of prediction errors and enhancing the accuracy of reconstructed motion features. The performance of the proposed method under various occlusion scenarios is comprehensively evaluated and compared with existing methods on popular benchmarks, namely PIE and JAAD. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more robust performance than existing methods in the literature. © 2026 IEEE.