  In this work, we explore the correlation between people trajectories and
their head orientations. We argue that people trajectory and head pose
forecasting can be modelled as a joint problem. Recent approaches on trajectory
forecasting leverage short-term trajectories (aka tracklets) of pedestrians to
predict their future paths. In addition, sociological cues, such as expected
destination or pedestrian interaction, are often combined with tracklets. In
this paper, we propose MiXing-LSTM (MX-LSTM) to capture the interplay between
positions and head orientations (vislets) thanks to a joint unconstrained
optimization of full covariance matrices during the LSTM backpropagation. We
additionally exploit the head orientations as a proxy for the visual attention,
when modeling social interactions. MX-LSTM predicts future pedestrians location
and head pose, increasing the standard capabilities of the current approaches
on long-term trajectory forecasting. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our
approach shows better performances on an extensive set of public benchmarks.
MX-LSTM is particularly effective when people move slowly, i.e. the most
challenging scenario for all other models. The proposed approach also allows
for accurate predictions on a longer time horizon.
