PseudoMapTrainer: Learning Online Mapping without HD Maps
This addresses the cost and geographic limitations of HD maps for autonomous driving systems, representing a novel approach rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of training online mapping models without expensive high-definition maps by using pseudo-labels from unlabeled sensor data, achieving the first method to train such models without ground-truth maps.
Online mapping models show remarkable results in predicting vectorized maps from multi-view camera images only. However, all existing approaches still rely on ground-truth high-definition maps during training, which are expensive to obtain and often not geographically diverse enough for reliable generalization. In this work, we propose PseudoMapTrainer, a novel approach to online mapping that uses pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled sensor data. We derive those pseudo-labels by reconstructing the road surface from multi-camera imagery using Gaussian splatting and semantics of a pre-trained 2D segmentation network. In addition, we introduce a mask-aware assignment algorithm and loss function to handle partially masked pseudo-labels, allowing for the first time the training of online mapping models without any ground-truth maps. Furthermore, our pseudo-labels can be effectively used to pre-train an online model in a semi-supervised manner to leverage large-scale unlabeled crowdsourced data. The code is available at github.com/boschresearch/PseudoMapTrainer.