Lane Marking Verification for High Definition Map Maintenance Using Crowdsourced Images

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles often rely on high-definition (HD) maps to navigate around. However, lane markings (LMs) are not necessarily static objects due to wear & tear from usage and road reconstruction & maintenance. Therefore, the wrong matching between LMs in the HD map and sensor readings may lead to erroneous localization or even cause traffic accidents. It is imperative to keep LMs up-to-date. However, frequently recollecting data with dedicated hardware and specialists to update HD maps is not only cost-prohibitive but also unviable. Here we propose to utilize crowdsourced images from multiple vehicles at different times to help verify LMs for HD map maintenance. We obtain the LM distribution in the image space by considering the camera pose uncertainty in perspective projection. Both LMs in HD map and LMs in the image are treated as observations of LM distributions which allow us to construct posterior conditional distribution (a.k.a Bayesian belief functions) of LMs from either sources. An LM is consistent if belief functions from the map and the image satisfy statistical hypothesis testing. We further extend the Bayesian belief model into a sequential belief update using crowdsourced images. LMs with a higher probability of existence are kept in the HD map whereas those with a lower probability of existence are removed from the HD map. We verify our approach using real data. Experimental results show that our method is capable of verifying and updating LMs in the HD map.