Simultaneous Detection and Localization for Intelligent Vehicles Based on HD Map Matching and Semantic Likelihood Model

Accurate matching between in-vehicle sensor data and high-definition (HD) maps is crucial to improve the performance of perception and localization of intelligent vehicles. A novel algorithm of HD map matching based on the developed semantic likelihood model (SLM) is proposed to achieve intelligent vehicle localization and object detection simultaneously. First, semantic pavement objects are extracted from front-view images by using U-Net, and SLM is constructed with kernel density estimation (KDE). Under a particle filter framework, the likelihood between the sensor data and HD map is calculated by projecting each sample point from HD map with pose transformation onto SLM to update the weight of each particle. Simultaneously, accurate detection of pavement markings is accomplished by projecting all elements onto the HD map with the computed localization results. In the experiment, data collected on campus and on urban roads are used to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the localization errors in both scenarios are about 14 cm, and the mean intersection over union (MIoU) of road marking detection is above 80. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve both localization and detection performance by effectively utilizing the prior information of HD maps, compared with the state of the art (SOTA) methods, such as deep learning-based detection methods.