Towards Robust Visual Localization Using Multi-View Images and HD Vector Map

Abstract

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Robust and accurate localization is highly desired in intelligent driving and robotic navigation. Existing methods highly rely on feature maps and complex parameter tuning, while suffering from ineffective data association, heavy computation, high dependency on training data and low robustness. In this paper, we propose a high-robust and cost-effective visual localization system, which jointly exploits the semantic information of Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) representation from multi-view images and the vectorized High Definition (HD) map. We formulate the visual localization as cross-modal data association issue and innovatively project the vectorized landmarks of HD map into BEV semantic map. Finally, the highly accurate vehicle’s pose can be estimated by pose optimization based on direct image alignment. Extensive simulations experimented on nuScenes dataset show that the proposed method can deliver robust and accurate localization results under various scenarios. In addition, the proposed system is convenient for large-scale deployment and has been tested on the commercial test car.