Lane information plays an important role in high-definition (HD) maps because it provides invaluable road information for autonomous vehicles. The most widely used lane extraction method for HD maps is based on mobile mapping systems, and it is prohibitively costly and time-consuming. In this study, we propose a novel approach for lane information extraction based on crowdsourcing vehicles equipped with monocular cameras and global navigation satellite system devices for recording road images and position data. First, we propose a lane mask propagation network to detect the lane markings in images, which are then projected from a perspective space into a three-dimensional space in accordance with the position data. Second, we propose a data management method to store lane information in the cloud data center. An improved density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise clustering algorithm and a gradual fitting algorithm are used to remove the outliers and improve the lane data accuracy. The proposed method is quantitatively evaluated against a real-world HD map produced by a mobile mapping vehicle. The experimental results show that more than 80% of the extracted lane markings meet the accuracy requirements of HD maps. In conclusion, our method can be used as a low-cost and efficient approach for updating the lane information in HD maps for autonomous vehicles.
19 May 2023 in International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
On campus, the complexity of the environment and the lack of regulatory constraints make it difficult to model the environment, resulting in less efficient motion planning algorithms. To solve this problem, HD-Map-guided sampling-based motion planning is a feasible research direction. We proposed a motion planning algorithm for autonomous vehicles on campus, called HD-Map-guided rapidly-exploring random tree (HDM-RRT). In our algorithm, A collision risk map (CR-Map) that quantifies the collision risk coefficient on the road is combined with the Gaussian distribution for sampling to improve the efficiency of algorithm. Then, the node optimization strategy of the algorithm is deeply optimized through the prior information of the CR-Map to improve the convergence rate and solve the problem of poor stability in campus environments. Three experiments were designed to verify the efficiency and stability of our approach. The results show that the sampling efficiency of our algorithm is four times higher than that of the Gaussian distribution method. The average convergence rate of the proposed algorithm outperforms the RRT* algorithm and DT-RRT* algorithm. In terms of algorithm efficiency, the average computation time of the proposed algorithm is only 15.98 ms, which is much better than that of the three compared algorithms.