A Collaborative Framework for High-Definition Mapping
This addresses the problem of cost-effective and scalable mapping for road safety in autonomous and connected vehicles, representing an incremental improvement over existing solutions.
The paper tackles the challenge of building accurate high-definition maps for connected vehicles by proposing a collaborative framework where vehicles with standard sensors update a shared map of landmarks, resulting in map accuracy that converges towards zero error as more vehicles contribute.
For connected vehicles to have a substantial effect on road safety, it is required that accurate positions and trajectories can be shared. To this end, all vehicles must be accurately geolocalized in a common frame. This can be achieved by merging GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) information and visual observations matched with a map of geo-positioned landmarks. Building such a map remains a challenge, and current solutions are facing strong cost-related limitations. We present a collaborative framework for high-definition mapping, in which vehicles equipped with standard sensors, such as a GNSS receiver and a mono-visual camera, update a map of geolocalized landmarks. Our system is composed of two processing blocks: the first one is embedded in each vehicle, and aims at geolocalizing the vehicle and the detected feature marks. The second is operated on cloud servers, and uses observations from all the vehicles to compute updates for the map of geo-positioned landmarks. As the map's landmarks are detected and positioned by more and more vehicles, the accuracy of the map increases, eventually converging in probability towards a null error. The landmarks geo-positions are estimated in a stable and scalable way, enabling to provide dynamic map updates in an automatic manner.