DuMapNet: An End-to-End Vectorization System for City-Scale Lane-Level Map Generation

TL;DR

DuMapNet is an industrial-grade, end-to-end system that generates detailed city-scale lane-level maps using a transformer-based approach, significantly reducing costs and improving accuracy in complex urban environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces DuMapNet, a novel end-to-end vectorization system with a group-wise lane prediction and contextual prompts encoder, advancing city-scale lane-level map generation.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on large-scale datasets.

Deployed in Baidu Maps, supporting 360+ cities.

Reduces map generation costs by 95%.

Abstract

Generating city-scale lane-level maps faces significant challenges due to the intricate urban environments, such as blurred or absent lane markings. Additionally, a standard lane-level map requires a comprehensive organization of lane groupings, encompassing lane direction, style, boundary, and topology, yet has not been thoroughly examined in prior research. These obstacles result in labor-intensive human annotation and high maintenance costs. This paper overcomes these limitations and presents an industrial-grade solution named DuMapNet that outputs standardized, vectorized map elements and their topology in an end-to-end paradigm. To this end, we propose a group-wise lane prediction (GLP) system that outputs vectorized results of lane groups by meticulously tailoring a transformer-based network. Meanwhile, to enhance generalization in challenging scenarios, such as road wear and occlusions, as well as to improve global consistency, a contextual prompts encoder (CPE) module is proposed, which leverages the predicted results of spatial neighborhoods as contextual information. Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of DuMapNet. Additionally, DuMap-Net has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps since June 2023, supporting lane-level map generation tasks for over 360 cities while bringing a 95% reduction in costs. This demonstrates that DuMapNet serves as a practical and cost-effective industrial solution for city-scale lane-level map generation.