VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning
This addresses the scalability and efficiency issues in map creation for autonomous driving systems by eliminating manual annotation and heuristic post-processing.
The paper tackles the problem of generating vectorized high-definition maps for autonomous driving by introducing VectorMapNet, an end-to-end pipeline that predicts polylines from sensor data, achieving state-of-the-art performance with improvements of 14.2 mAP and 14.6 mAP on two datasets.
Autonomous driving systems require High-Definition (HD) semantic maps to navigate around urban roads. Existing solutions approach the semantic mapping problem by offline manual annotation, which suffers from serious scalability issues. Recent learning-based methods produce dense rasterized segmentation predictions to construct maps. However, these predictions do not include instance information of individual map elements and require heuristic post-processing to obtain vectorized maps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end vectorized HD map learning pipeline, termed VectorMapNet. VectorMapNet takes onboard sensor observations and predicts a sparse set of polylines in the bird's-eye view. This pipeline can explicitly model the spatial relation between map elements and generate vectorized maps that are friendly to downstream autonomous driving tasks. Extensive experiments show that VectorMapNet achieve strong map learning performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 14.2 mAP and 14.6mAP. Qualitatively, VectorMapNet is capable of generating comprehensive maps and capturing fine-grained details of road geometry. To the best of our knowledge, VectorMapNet is the first work designed towards end-to-end vectorized map learning from onboard observations. Our project website is available at \url{https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/vectormapnet/}.