Frequent and Automatic Update of Lane-Level HD Maps with a Large Amount of Crowdsourced Data Acquired from Buses and Taxis in Seoul

Recently, HD maps have become important parts of autonomous driving, from localization to perception and path planning. For the practical application of HD maps, it is significant to regularly update environmental changes in HD maps. Conventional approaches require expensive mobile mapping systems and considerable manual work by experts, making it difficult to achieve frequent map updates. In this paper, we show how frequent and automatic updates of lane marking in HD maps are made possible with enormous crowdsourced data. Crowdsourced data is acquired from onboard low-cost sensing devices installed on many city buses and taxis in Seoul, South Korea. A large amount of crowdsourced data is daily accumulated on the server. The quality of sensor measurement is not very high due to the limited performance of low-cost devices. Therefore, the technical challenge is to overcome the uncertainty of the crowdsourced data. Appropriately filtering out a large amount of low-quality data is a significant problem. The proposed HD map update strategy comprises several processing steps including pose correction, observation assignment, observation clustering, and landmark classification. The proposed HD map update strategy is experimentally verified using crowdsourced data. If the changed environments are successfully extracted, then precisely updated HD maps are generated.