Driving with Context: Online Map Matching for Complex Roads Using Lane Markings and Scenario Recognition

Accurate online map matching is fundamental to vehicle navigation and the activation of intelligent driving functions. Current online map matching methods are prone to errors in complex road networks, especially in multilevel road area. To address this challenge, we propose an online Standard Definition (SD) map matching method by constructing a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with multiple probability factors. Our proposed method can achieve accurate map matching even in complex road networks by carefully leveraging lane markings and scenario recognition in the designing of the probability factors. First, the lane markings are generated by a multi-lane tracking method and associated with the SD map using HMM to build an enriched SD map. In areas covered by the enriched SD map, the vehicle can re-localize itself by performing Iterative Closest Point (ICP) registration for the lane markings. Then, the probability factor accounting for the lane marking detection can be obtained using the association probability between adjacent lanes and roads. Second, the driving scenario recognition model is applied to generate the emission probability factor of scenario recognition, which improves the performance of map matching on elevated roads and ordinary urban roads underneath them. We validate our method through extensive road tests in Europe and China, and the experimental results show that our proposed method effectively improves the online map matching accuracy as compared to other existing methods, especially in multilevel road area. Specifically, the experiments show that our proposed method achieves $F_1$ scores of 98.04% and 94.60% on the Zenseact Open Dataset and test data of multilevel road areas in Shanghai respectively, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. The implementation is available at https://github.com/TRV-Lab/LMSR-OMM.