Accurate Vehicle Localization Research Articles

Research on YOLOv5 Vehicle Detection and Positioning System Based on Binocular Vision

Vehicle detection and location is one of the key sensing tasks of automatic driving systems. Traditional detection methods are easily affected by illumination, occlusion and scale changes in complex scenes, which limits the accuracy and robustness of detection. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a vehicle detection and location method for YOLOv5(You Only Look Once version 5) based on binocular vision. Binocular vision uses two cameras to obtain images from different angles at the same time. By calculating the difference between the two images, more accurate depth information can be obtained. The YOLOv5 algorithm is improved by adding the CBAM attention mechanism and replacing the loss function to improve target detection. Combining these two techniques can achieve accurate detection and localization of vehicles in 3D space. The method utilizes the depth information of binocular images and the improved YOLOv5 target detection algorithm to achieve accurate detection and localization of vehicles in front. Experimental results show that the method has high accuracy and robustness for vehicle detection and localization tasks.

Opportunistic UAV Deployment for Intelligent On-Demand IoV Service Management

Due to the current improvement in self-driving cars and the extensive focus and research on the topic of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the near future may behold a great revolution in the automotive industry as cars become fully autonomous. This change entails a considerable amount of data to be transferred from internet of things (IoT) devices, such as radars, sensors, and actuators. Consequently, overwhelming the existing infrastructure, namely cloud, and Road Side Units (RSU), reduces the quality of service (QoS) experienced by vehicular users. Accordingly, this paper contributes in proposing a new architecture for using Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) and On-Boarding Units (OBUs) working in collaboration to achieve a significantly improved QoS. The proposed framework offers an end-to-end solution for master election, cluster management and recovery, vehicle selection, service placement, and accurate localization of vehicles. A QoS improvement is possible through an efficient cluster formation and placement solution that assigns lightweight services, as containers, to OBUs and UAVs while meeting various objectives. The efficiency of the proposed scheme originates from the use of the evolutionary Memetic Algorithm that 1) respects the mobility and energy constraints of UAVs and OBUs, 2) meets the user demands, and 3) uses machine learning for the accurate localization of vehicles. Our experiments using the Mininet-Wifi and SUMO simulators show at least 30% improvement in terms of QoS compared to a state-of-the-art solution.

Efficient and Accurate Vehicle Localization Based on LiDAR Place Recognition

An efficient and accurate LiDAR place recognition methodology is proposed for vehicle localization. First, the Iris-LOAM is proposed to overcome the disadvantages of low accuracy of loop-closure detection and low efficiency of map construction in the existing LOAM-series methods. The method integrates the LiDAR-Iris global descriptor and Normal Distribution Transform (NDT) registration method into the loop-closure detection module of LiDAR Odometry and Mapping (LOAM), thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of map construction. For the shortcomings of low map loading and matching efficiency, the Random Sample Consensus method is used to remove the ground point cloud information. The Voxel Grid method is used to down sample the loaded map. Finally, the NDT method is adopted for point cloud map matching to obtain the position information. Show that the Iris-LOAM has higher efficiency than the SC-LeGO-LOAM. The average time of point cloud map matching is reduced by 39.5%. The place recognition can be executed to achieve accuracy vehicle localization.

Learning From FM Communications: Toward Accurate, Efficient, All-Terrain Vehicle Localization

Vehicle localization service is a fundamental component of intelligent transportation systems. The widely used satellite navigation systems perform poorly in urban areas because the lines of sight to satellites are blocked by complex terrain characteristics, e.g., buildings, elevated streets and interchanges. In this paper, we design RadioLoc, a novel system achieving accurate, efficient, all-terrain vehicle localization with two key design points. First, RadioLoc harvests the frequency modulation (FM) signal, which has higher availability than satellite signal in complex terrains, as the signal source for localization. Second, RadioLoc integrates modern machine learning techniques into the processing of FM signals to efficiently learn the accurate vehicle localization in all-terrain environments. We validate the feasibility of FM-based vehicle localization and corresponding challenges and practical issues via field tests (e.g., signal distortion, signal inconsistency and limited in-vehicle radio bandwidth), and develop a series of advanced techniques in RadioLoc to address them, including adaptive batching, frequency sweeping, a novel multipath delay spread filter, a reconstructive PCA denoiser and a tailored FM feature extractor. We then develop a generic, modular localization module in RadioLoc, and design different learning-based 3D position identification algorithms for this module. We implement a prototype of RadioLoc and perform extensive field experiments to evaluate its efficiency and efficacy. Results show that (1) RadioLoc achieves a real-time localization latency of less than 100 milliseconds; (2) RadioLoc achieves a worst-case localization accuracy of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$99.6\%$</tex-math> </inline-formula> even in an underground parking lot, and (3) the horizontal error of RadioLoc is only one sixth of a dedicated GPS device even when the vehicle is moving at a high-speed (i.e., <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$80$</tex-math> </inline-formula> km/h) in a complex highway scenario.

LiDAR Road-Atlas: An Efficient Map Representation for General 3D Urban Environment

In this work, we propose the LiDAR Road-Atlas, a compact and efficient 3D map representation, for autonomous robot or vehicle navigation in a general urban environment. The LiDAR Road-Atlas can be generated by an online mapping framework which incrementally merges local 2D occupancy grid maps (2D-OGMs). Specifically, the contributions of our method are threefold. First, we solve the challenging problem of creating local 2D-OGMs in nonstructured urban scenes based on a real-time delimitation of traversable and curb regions in a LiDAR point cloud. Second, we achieve accurate 3D mapping in multiple-layer urban road scenarios by a probabilistic fusion scheme. Third, we achieve a very efficient 3D map representation of a general environment thanks to the automatic local-OGM-induced traversable-region labeling and a sparse probabilistic local point-cloud encoding. Given the LiDAR Road-Atlas, one can achieve accurate vehicle localization, path planning, and some other tasks. Our map representation is insensitive to dynamic objects which can be filtered out in the resulting map based on a probabilistic fusion. Empirically, we compare our map representation with a couple of popular map representations in robotics society, and our map representation is more favorable in terms of efficiency, scalability, and compactness. Additionally, we also evaluate localization performance given the LiDAR Road-Atlas representations on two public datasets. With a 16-channel LiDAR sensor, our method achieves an average global localization error of 0.26 m (translation) and 1.07 (rotation) on the Apollo dataset, and 0.89 m (translation) and 1.29 (rotation) on the MulRan dataset, respectively, at 10 Hz, which validates its promising performance. The code for this work is open-sourced at https://github.com/IMRL/Lidar-road-atlas.

Pavement Marking Incorporated With Binary Code for Accurate Localization of Autonomous Vehicles

Accurate localization is a critically important issue for autonomous vehicles as it is closely related to the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving. However, current technologies for autonomous vehicle localization face many challenges. To provide accurate and robust localization services to autonomous vehicles, we propose a novel solution by employing a newly designed pavement marking. This marking operates on color contrast, temperature contrast, and binary code with some special features. We also trained and customized an object detector based on a deep learning model: YOLOv5, and integrated it with the decoding algorithm. The localization system is capable of running at a steady frame rate of more than 50 FPS. Road trials up to 80 km/h were conducted, and satisfactory results confirmed the feasibility and robustness of the localization system. Specifically, with a common onboard camera, more than four continuous frames can be detected and decoded correctly when the speed is slower than 30 km/h. At least one frame can be detected and decoded correctly at a higher speed (i.e., 30– 50 km/h). With a high-speed camera, more than 18 frames can be detected and decoded even at 80 km/h. The findings suggest that the specially designed road marking and associated algorithms can provide a viable and economical option for accurate localization of autonomous vehicles. The performance of the system has potentials for further improvement by using better hardware such as faster CPUs, GPUs, and thermal imaging techniques.

OpenStreetMap-Based LiDAR Global Localization in Urban Environment Without a Prior LiDAR Map

Using publicly accessible maps, we propose a novel vehicle localization method that can be applied without using prior light detection and ranging (LiDAR) maps. Our method generates OSM descriptors by calculating the distances to buildings from a location in OpenStreetMap at a regular angle, and LiDAR descriptors by calculating the shortest distances to building points from the current location at a regular angle. Comparing the OSM descriptors and LiDAR descriptors yields a highly accurate vehicle localization result. Compared to methods that use prior LiDAR maps, our method presents two main advantages: (1) vehicle localization is not limited to only places with previously acquired LiDAR maps, and (2) our method is comparable to LiDAR map-based methods, and especially outperforms the other methods with respect to the top one candidate at KITTI dataset sequence 00.

High-Precision and Fast LiDAR Odometry and Mapping Algorithm

LiDAR SLAM technology is an important method for the accurate navigation of automatic vehicles and is a prerequisite for the safe driving of automatic vehicles in the unstructured road environment of complex parks. This paper proposes a LiDAR fast point cloud registration algorithm that can realize fast and accurate localization and mapping of automatic vehicle point clouds through a combination of a normal distribution transform (NDT) and point-to-line iterative closest point (PLICP). First, the NDT point cloud registration algorithm is applied for the rough registration of point clouds between adjacent frames to achieve a rough estimate of the pose of automatic vehicles. Then, the PLICP point cloud registration algorithm is adopted to correct the rough registration result of the point cloud. This step completes the precise registration of the point cloud and achieves an accurate estimate of the pose of the automatic vehicle. Finally, cloud registration is accumulated over time, and the point cloud information is continuously updated to construct the point cloud map. Through numerous experiments, we compared the proposed algorithm with PLICP. The average number of iterations of the point cloud registration between adjacent frames was reduced by 6.046. The average running time of the point cloud registration between adjacent frames decreased by 43.05156 ms. The efficiency of the point cloud registration calculation increased by approximately 51.7%. By applying the KITTI dataset, the computational efficiency of NDT-ICP was approximately 60% higher than that of LeGO-LOAM. The proposed method realizes the accurate localization and mapping of automatic vehicles relying on vehicle LiDAR in a complex park environment and was applied to a Small Cyclone automatic vehicle. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm is reliable and effective.

Visual SLAM in Long-Range Autonomous Parking Application Based on Instance-Aware Semantic Segmentation via Multi-Task Network Cascades and Metric Learning Scheme

&lt;div class="section abstract"&gt;&lt;div class="htmlview paragraph"&gt;Long-range Autonomous Parking is becoming an attractive application in terms of demands. The vehicle is capable of driving autonomously into the appointed parking slot when the driver leaves it at the drop-off spot. In this application, the ability of accurate localization has become a key issue, especially in GPS-denied environments. This paper proposes a method of localization and mapping for Long-range Autonomous Parking, which is achieved by Visual SLAM based on deep learning algorithms. Firstly, we propose an instance segmentation via multi-task network cascades, and even in a complex visual environment, the main roadway instances of interest in the parking lot IPM image can be detected, such as parking corners, speed bumps. Then we combine the information of wheel encoders to build a global semantic map of the parking lot. Vehicles can often rely on semantic map matching to achieve high-precision localization. However, without a good initial position, it is difficult to infer an accurate position by matching the semantic map, such as randomly selecting entrances to enter the parking lot. Therefore, we propose an area feature network based on metric learning to extract features that distinguish different areas and infer the approximate initial position of the vehicle. Specifically, we extract features from the images of the surround-view cameras, use the vehicle position as weak supervision, and finally construct an area feature map. In summary, our proposed method provides accurate vehicle localization and parking lot maps for Long-range Autonomous Parking.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;

Cooperative Localization With Constraint Satisfaction Problem in 5G Vehicular Networks

5G new radio will provide a new paradigm in high accurate vehicle localization, reinforced by the use of large antenna arrays along with carefully designed broadband radio technology. However, a high computational load still remains unravelled in the context of cooperative localization, albeit with its advantages of high-precision localization. To alleviate such the computational burden, we develop a reliable technique of cooperative localization, addressed as a constraint satisfaction problem. A constraint satisfaction formalism for cooperative localization readily enables to recast a formulation of the decentralized optimization. Its efficient solution of the optimization is developed in a distributed manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach saves the requested computational loads significantly while sustaining the satisfactory accuracy of cooperative localization.

Integrating Intervehicular Communications, Vehicle Localization, and a Digital Map for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control with Target Detection Loss

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) that enables vehicle following with desired inter-vehicular distances. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is upgraded ACC that utilizes additional inter-vehicular wireless communication to share vehicle states such as acceleration to enable shorter gap following. Both ACC and CACC rely on range sensors such as radar to obtain the actual inter-vehicular distance for gap-keeping control. The range sensor may lose detection of the target, the preceding vehicle, on curvy roads or steep hills due to limited angle of view. Unfavourable weather conditions, target selection failure, or hardware issue may also result in target detection loss. During target detection loss, the vehicle following system usually falls back to Cruise Control (CC) wherein the follower vehicle maintains a constant speed. In this work, we propose an alternative way to obtain the inter-vehicular distance during target detection loss to continue vehicle following. The proposed algorithm integrates inter-vehicular communication, accurate vehicle localization, and a digital map with lane center information to approximate the inter-vehicular distance. In-lab robot following experiments demonstrated that the proposed algorithm provided desirable inter-vehicular distance approximation. Although the algorithm is intended for vehicle following application, it can also be used for other scenarios that demand vehicles' relative distance approximation. The work also showcases our in-lab development effort of robotic emulation of traffic for connected and automated vehicles.

Localization in Unstructured Environments: Towards Autonomous Robots in Forests with Delaunay Triangulation

Autonomous harvesting and transportation is a long-term goal of the forest industry. One of the main challenges is the accurate localization of both vehicles and trees in a forest. Forests are unstructured environments where it is difficult to find a group of significant landmarks for current fast feature-based place recognition algorithms. This paper proposes a novel approach where local point clouds are matched to a global tree map using the Delaunay triangularization as the representation format. Instead of point cloud based matching methods, we utilize a topology-based method. First, tree trunk positions are registered at a prior run done by a forest harvester. Second, the resulting map is Delaunay triangularized. Third, a local submap of the autonomous robot is registered, triangularized and matched using triangular similarity maximization to estimate the position of the robot. We test our method on a dataset accumulated from a forestry site at Lieksa, Finland. A total length of 200 m of harvester path was recorded by an industrial harvester with a 3D laser scanner and a geolocation unit fixed to the frame. Our experiments show a 12 cm s.t.d. in the location accuracy and with real-time data processing for speeds not exceeding 0.5 m/s. The accuracy and speed limit are realistic during forest operations.

An intelligent vehicle-tracking system solution for indoor parking

In addressing the challenge of drivers who are unable to locate their own vehicles in large indoor parking garages, an intelligent vehicle-tracking system is proposed in this paper. Through the use of QR (quick response) codes, map service, and local tile map package technologies, accurate vehicle location, tracking, and navigation functions are achieved. The software application on mobile phone with the Android operating system was implemented and tested in two indoor parking garages. The experimental results showed that the technical solution is available and practicable, and the results are of guiding significance to the extensive application of indoor vehicle tracking.

Lane-Level Map-Matching Method for Vehicle Localization Using GPS and Camera on a High-Definition Map.

Accurate vehicle localization is important for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. Existing precise localization systems based on the global navigation satellite system cannot always provide lane-level accuracy even in open-sky environments. Map-based localization using high-definition (HD) maps is an interesting method for achieving greater accuracy. We propose a map-based localization method using a single camera. Our method relies on road link information in the HD map to achieve lane-level accuracy. Initially, we process the image—acquired using the camera of a mobile device—via inverse perspective mapping, which shows the entire road at a glance in the driving image. Subsequently, we use the Hough transform to detect the vehicle lines and acquire driving link information regarding the lane on which the vehicle is moving. The vehicle position is estimated by matching the global positioning system (GPS) and reference HD map. We employ iterative closest point-based map-matching to determine and eliminate the disparity between the GPS trajectories and reference map. Finally, we perform experiments by considering the data of a sophisticated GPS/inertial navigation system as the ground truth and demonstrate that the proposed method provides lane-level position accuracy for vehicle localization.

Visual Map-Based Localization for Intelligent Vehicles From Multi-View Site Matching

Accurate localization is a crucial step for intelligent vehicles (IVs). And vision-based localization methods are promising due to its good accuracy and low cost. However, vision-based methods are usually not robust enough due to the errors of matching similar road scenarios. In this paper, we proposed a visual map-based localization method, called multi-view site matching (MVSM). We proposed using two camera views (i.e., downward-view and front-view) to construct visual map. The visual map consists of a serial of nodes. Each node encodes the features of the road, the 2D structure, and the poses of the vehicle. Based on the constructed visual map, we proposed a multi-scale method for accurate vehicle localization. In coarse localization, we adopt a topological model to obtain a set of candidate nodes from visual map. Furthermore, holistic features from front view are matched within the candidates such that the best matched node is determined for image-level localization. In metric localization, the best matched is first verified with the local features from downward view. And the vehicle pose is finally computed by utilizing the 2D structure from the verified nodes in the map. In the experiment, the proposed MVSM method has been tested with actual field data covering different pavement types in different seasons. The proposed MVSM method can achieve less than 0.20m mean localization errors. Compared to existing vision-based methods, the proposed method utilizes two views to enhance image-level localization and 2D pavement structure to improve metric localization so as to greatly improve the overall localization performance.

Robust Sparse Bayesian Learning-Based Off-Grid DOA Estimation Method for Vehicle Localization

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles have been receiving more and more attention because they own many advantages compared with traditional vehicles. A robust and accurate vehicle localization system is critical to the safety and the efficiency of autonomous vehicles. The global positioning system (GPS) has been widely applied to the vehicle localization systems. However, the accuracy and the reliability of GPS have suffered in some scenarios. In this paper, we present a robust and accurate vehicle localization system consisting of a bistatic passive radar, in which the performance of localization is solely dependent on the accuracy of the proposed off-grid direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm. Under the framework of sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), the source powers and the noise variance are estimated by a fast evidence maximization method, and the off-grid gap is effectively handled by an advanced grid refining strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed method exhibits better performance than the existing sparse signal representation-based algorithms, and performs well in the vehicle localization system.

New Monte Carlo Localization Using Deep Initialization: A Three-Dimensional LiDAR and a Camera Fusion Approach

Fast and accurate global localization of autonomous ground vehicles is often required in indoor environments and GPS-shaded areas. Typically, with regard to global localization problem, the entire environment should be observed for a long time to converge. To overcome this limitation, a new initialization method called deep initialization is proposed and it is applied to Monte Carlo localization (MCL). The proposed method is based on the combination of a three-dimensional (3D) light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and a camera. Using a camera, pose regression based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is conducted to initialize particles of MCL. Particles are sampled from the tangent space to a manifold structure of the group of rigid motion. Using a 3D LiDAR as a sensor, a particle filter is applied to estimate the sensor pose. Furthermore, we propose a re-localization method for performing initialization whenever a localization failure or the situation of robot kidnapping is detected. Either the localization failure or the kidnapping is detected by combining the outputs from a camera and 3D LiDAR. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a mobile robot platform to prove the method's effectiveness in terms of both the localization accuracy and time consumed for estimating the pose correctly.

Camera and Radar Sensor Fusion for Robust Vehicle Localization via Vehicle Part Localization

Many production vehicles are now equipped with both cameras and radar in order to provide various driver-assistance systems (DAS) with position information of surrounding objects. These sensors, however, cannot provide position information accurate enough to realize highly automated driving functions and other advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Sensor fusion methods were proposed to overcome these limitations, but they tend to show limited detection performance gain in terms of accuracy and robustness. In this study, we propose a camera-radar sensor fusion framework for robust vehicle localization based on vehicle part (rear corner) detection and localization. The main idea of the proposed method is to reinforce the azimuth angle accuracy of the radar information by detecting and localizing the rear corner part of the target vehicle from an image. This part-based fusion approach enables accurate vehicle localization as well as robust performance with respect to occlusions. For efficient part detection, several candidate points are generated around the initial radar point. Then, a widely adopted deep learning approach is used to detect and localize the left and right corners of target vehicles. The corner detection network outputs their reliability score based on the localization uncertainty of the center point in corner parts. Using these position reliability scores along with a particle filter, the most probable rear corner positions are estimated. Estimated positions (pixel coordinate) are translated into angular data, and the surrounding vehicle is localized with respect to the ego-vehicle by combining the angular data of the rear corner and the radar's range data in the lateral and longitudinal direction. The experimental test results show that the proposed method provides significantly better localization performance in the lateral direction, with greatly reduced maximum errors (radar: 3.02m, proposed method: 0.66m) and root mean squared errors (radar: 0.57m, proposed method: 0.18m).

Accurate vehicle location and tracking algorithms based on improved kernelized correlation motion model and Kalman filter in intelligent transport surveillance system

Vision-based traffic surveillance, an indispensable part of intelligent transport system (ITS), has been widely studied over past few years. Due to the factors such as visual occlusion, illumination change and pose variation, it is a challenging task to develop effective and efficient models for vehicle detection and tracking in surveillance videos. Although plenty of existing related models have been proposed, many problems still need to be resolved. A novel improved kernelized correlation tracking algorithm based on Kalman filter and motion model is proposed to solve the tracking accuracy deteriorated by fast-moving and severe occlusion. Firstly, an adaptive search region location method is proposed, where the optimal position is estimated by the uncertainty theory of the motion model so as to obtain the optimal search window. Secondly, a confidence strategy for similarity measurement is calculated by using the sharpness of the correlation peak and the smoothness constraint. Finally, the optimal confidence is introduced to get an adaptive update model. A large number of simulation experiments show that our proposed algorithm has more robust performance and anti-interference ability than the traditional KCF algorithm, which is suitable for intelligent transport system application.

Network Design for Accurate Vehicle Localization

Network-based localization plays a key role on the introduction of emerging road applications, such as connected autonomous driving. These applications demand unprecedented precise, reliable and secure positioning, with localization requirements below 1 m. This stringent demand is pushing for the use of road-side units (RSUs) from fifth generation and vehicular networks for accurate vehicle localization. However, these networks are not typically designed for positioning but for data communication purposes, which follow a different paradigm for the network deployment and operation. This paper provides design guidelines on dedicated network deployments with the aim of achieving accurate vehicle-to-infrastructure positioning in road scenarios. First, the network layout or site placement is assessed with a geometrical metric. Then, the minimum density of RSUs along the road is bounded with line-of-sight probability models for urban street and highway scenarios. Finally, the Cramér-Rao bound for joint time-of-arrival (ToA) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) localization is used to maximize the distance between RSUs along the road, by exploiting multi-antenna deployments. According to the simulation results, the network sites are recommended to be located at alternate sides of the road, with a maximum distance between RSUs of 40 and 230 m for urban and rural environments, respectively. Following these design guidelines, there is also the need to exploit antenna arrays to combine uplink ToA and AoA estimates, in order to ensure a vehicle location accuracy below one meter on the 95% of the cases. The use of eight antenna elements at the RSUs is found to reduce nearly one and a half times the minimum network density in highway localization deployments.