Mahdi Elhousni

Elhousni Mahdi, Huang Xinming

As the autonomous driving industry is slowly maturing, visual map localization is quickly becoming the standard approach to localize cars as accurately as possible. Owing to the rich data returned by visual sensors such as cameras or LiDARs, researchers are able to build different types of maps with various levels of details, and use them to achieve high levels of vehicle localization accuracy and stability in urban environments. Contrary to the popular SLAM approaches, visual map localization relies on pre-built maps, and is focused solely on improving the localization accuracy by avoiding error accumulation or drift. We define visual map localization as a two-stage process. At the stage of place recognition, the initial position of the vehicle in the map is determined by comparing the visual sensor output with a set of geo-tagged map regions of interest. Subsequently, at the stage of map metric localization, the vehicle is tracked while it moves across the map by continuously aligning the visual sensors' output with the current area of the map that is being traversed. In this paper, we survey, discuss and compare the latest methods for LiDAR based, camera based and cross-modal visual map localization for both stages, in an effort to highlight the strength and weakness of each approach.

Elhousni Mahdi, Zhang Ziming, Huang Xinming

Deep learning provides a powerful new approach to many computer vision tasks. Height prediction from aerial images is one of those tasks that benefited greatly from the deployment of deep learning which replaced old multi-view geometry techniques. This letter proposes a two-stage approach, where first a multi-task neural network is used to predict the height map resulting from a single RGB aerial input image. We also include a second refinement step, where a denoising autoencoder is used to produce higher quality height maps. Experiments on two publicly available datasets show that our method is capable of producing state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://github.com/melhousni/DSMNet.

Mahdi Elhousni, Xinming Huang

LiDAR sensors are becoming one of the most essential sensors in achieving full autonomy for self driving cars. LiDARs are able to produce rich, dense and precise spatial data, which can tremendously help in localizing and tracking a moving vehicle. In this paper, we review the latest finding in 3D LiDAR localization for autonomous driving cars, and analyse the results obtained by each method, in an effort to guide the research community towards the path that seems to be the most promising.

Mahdi Elhousni, Xinming Huang

Pedestrian tracking has long been considered an important problem, especially in security applications. Previously,many approaches have been proposed with various types of sensors. One popular method is Pedestrian Dead Reckoning(PDR) [1] which is based on the inertial measurement unit(IMU) sensor. However PDR is an integration and threshold based method, which suffers from accumulation errors and low accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel method in which the sensor data is fed into a deep learning model to predict the displacements and orientations of the pedestrian. We also devise a new apparatus to collect and construct databases containing synchronized IMU sensor data and precise locations measured by a LIDAR. The preliminary results are promising, and we plan to push this forward by collecting more data and adapting the deep learning model for all general pedestrian motions.

Mahdi Elhousni, Yecheng Lyu, Ziming Zhang et al.

In a world where autonomous driving cars are becoming increasingly more common, creating an adequate infrastructure for this new technology is essential. This includes building and labeling high-definition (HD) maps accurately and efficiently. Today, the process of creating HD maps requires a lot of human input, which takes time and is prone to errors. In this paper, we propose a novel method capable of generating labelled HD maps from raw sensor data. We implemented and tested our methods on several urban scenarios using data collected from our test vehicle. The results show that the pro-posed deep learning based method can produce highly accurate HD maps. This approach speeds up the process of building and labeling HD maps, which can make meaningful contribution to the deployment of autonomous vehicle.