RTMap: Real-Time Recursive Mapping with Change Detection and Localization

While recent online HD mapping methods relieve burdened offline pipelines and solve map freshness, they remain limited by perceptual inaccuracies, occlusion in dense traffic, and an inability to fuse multi-agent observations. We propose RTMap to enhance these single-traversal methods by persistently crowdsourcing a multi-traversal HD map as a self-evolutional memory. On onboard agents, RTMap simultaneously addresses three core challenges in an end-to-end fashion: (1) Uncertainty-aware positional modeling for HD map elements, (2) probabilistic-aware localization w.r.t. the crowdsourced prior-map, and (3) real-time detection for possible road structural changes. Experiments on several public autonomous driving datasets demonstrate our solid performance on both the prior-aided map quality and the localization accuracy, demonstrating our effectiveness of robustly serving downstream prediction and planning modules while gradually improving the accuracy and freshness of the crowdsourced prior-map asynchronously. Our source-code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/CN-ADLab/RTMap (Camera ready version incorporating reviewer suggestions will be updated soon).

EgoVM: Achieving Precise Ego-Localization using Lightweight Vectorized Maps

Accurate and reliable ego-localization is critical for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present EgoVM, an end-to-end localization network that achieves comparable localization accuracy to prior state-of-the-art methods, but uses lightweight vectorized maps instead of heavy point-based maps. To begin with, we extract BEV features from online multi-view images and LiDAR point cloud. Then, we employ a set of learnable semantic embeddings to encode the semantic types of map elements and supervise them with semantic segmentation, to make their feature representation consistent with BEV features. After that, we feed map queries, composed of learnable semantic embeddings and coordinates of map elements, into a transformer decoder to perform cross-modality matching with BEV features. Finally, we adopt a robust histogram-based pose solver to estimate the optimal pose by searching exhaustively over candidate poses. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of our method using both the nuScenes dataset and a newly collected dataset. The experimental results show that our method achieves centimeter-level localization accuracy, and outperforms existing methods using vectorized maps by a large margin. Furthermore, our model has been extensively tested in a large fleet of autonomous vehicles under various challenging urban scenes.