A Collaborative Framework for High-Definition Mapping

For connected vehicles to have a substantial effect on road safety, it is required that accurate positions and trajectories can be shared. To this end, all vehicles must be accurately geo-localized in a common frame. This can be achieved by merging GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) information and visual observations matched with a map of geo-positioned landmarks. Building such a map remains a challenge, and current solutions are facing strong cost-related limitations. We present a collaborative framework for high-definition mapping, in which vehicles equipped with standard sensors, such as a GNSS receiver and a mono-visual camera, update a map of geo-localized landmarks. Our system is composed of two processing blocks: the first one is embedded in each vehicle, and aims at geo-localizing the vehicle and the detected feature marks. The second is operated on cloud servers, and uses observations from all the vehicles to compute updates for the map of geo-positioned landmarks. As the map's landmarks are detected and positioned by more and more vehicles, the accuracy of the map increases, eventually converging in probability towards a null error. The landmarks' geo-positions are estimated in a stable and scalable way, enabling to provide dynamic map updates in an automatic manner.