Hough2Map -- Iterative Event-based Hough Transform for High-Speed Railway Mapping
This addresses the need for accurate, real-time mapping in railway systems to improve safety and efficiency, though it is incremental as it adapts existing Hough transform methods to event-based cameras.
The paper tackled the problem of high-speed railway mapping by proposing Hough2Map, an iterative event-based Hough transform framework that detects and tracks poles as landmarks, achieving a detection reliability of up to 92% and a mapping accuracy of 1.1518m RMSE.
To cope with the growing demand for transportation on the railway system, accurate, robust, and high-frequency positioning is required to enable a safe and efficient utilization of the existing railway infrastructure. As a basis for a localization system we propose a complete on-board mapping pipeline able to map robust meaningful landmarks, such as poles from power lines, in the vicinity of the vehicle. Such poles are good candidates for reliable and long term landmarks even through difficult weather conditions or seasonal changes. To address the challenges of motion blur and illumination changes in railway scenarios we employ a Dynamic Vision Sensor, a novel event-based camera. Using a sideways oriented on-board camera, poles appear as vertical lines. To map such lines in a real-time event stream, we introduce Hough2Map, a novel consecutive iterative event-based Hough transform framework capable of detecting, tracking, and triangulating close-by structures. We demonstrate the mapping reliability and accuracy of Hough2Map on real-world data in typical usage scenarios and evaluate using surveyed infrastructure ground truth maps. Hough2Map achieves a detection reliability of up to 92% and a mapping root mean square error accuracy of 1.1518m.