Exploring OpenStreetMap Availability for Driving Environment Understanding

With the great achievement of artificial intelligence, vehicle technologies have advanced significantly from human centric driving towards fully automated driving. An intelligent vehicle should be able to understand the driver's perception of the environment as well as controlling behavior of the vehicle. Since high digital map information has been available to provide rich environmental context about static roads, buildings and traffic infrastructures, it would be worthwhile to explore map data capability for driving task understanding. Alternative to commercial used maps, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) data is a free open dataset, which makes it unique for the exploration research. This study is focused on two tasks that leverage OSM for driving environment understanding. First, driving scenario attributes are retrieved from OSM elements, which are combined with vehicle dynamic signals for the driving event recognition. Utilizing steering angle changes and based on a Bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network (Bi-RNN), a driving sequence is segmented and classified as lane-keeping, lane-change-left, lane-change-right, turn-left, and turn-right events. Second, for autonomous driving perception, OSM data can be used to render virtual street views, represented as prior knowledge to fuse with vision/laser systems for road semantic segmentation. Five different types of road masks are generated from OSM, images, and Lidar points, and fused to characterize the drivable space at the driver's perspective. An alternative data-driven approach is based on a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), OSM availability for deep learning methods are discussed to reveal potential usage on compensating street view images and automatic road semantic annotation.