SATMapTR: Satellite Image Enhanced Online HD Map Construction

TL;DR

SATMapTR introduces a novel online HD map construction method that effectively fuses satellite imagery with onboard sensor data, significantly improving accuracy and robustness in autonomous driving scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents SATMapTR, a new model with gated feature refinement and geometry-aware fusion modules for better satellite and sensor data integration.

Findings

Achieves 73.8 mAP on nuScenes, outperforming previous models by 14.2 mAP.

Shows lower performance degradation under adverse weather and sensor failures.

Nearly triples mAP at extended perception ranges.

Abstract

High-definition (HD) maps are evolving from pre-annotated to real-time construction to better support autonomous driving in diverse scenarios. However, this process is hindered by low-quality input data caused by onboard sensors limited capability and frequent occlusions, leading to incomplete, noisy, or missing data, and thus reduced mapping accuracy and robustness. Recent efforts have introduced satellite images as auxiliary input, offering a stable, wide-area view to complement the limited ego perspective. However, satellite images in Bird's Eye View are often degraded by shadows and occlusions from vegetation and buildings. Prior methods using basic feature extraction and fusion remain ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose SATMapTR, a novel online map construction model that effectively fuses satellite image through two key components: (1) a gated feature refinement module that adaptively filters satellite image features by integrating high-level semantics with low-level structural cues to extract high signal-to-noise ratio map-relevant representations; and (2) a geometry-aware fusion module that consistently fuse satellite and BEV features at a grid-to-grid level, minimizing interference from irrelevant regions and low-quality inputs. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset show that SATMapTR achieves the highest mean average precision (mAP) of 73.8, outperforming state-of-the-art satellite-enhanced models by up to 14.2 mAP. It also shows lower mAP degradation under adverse weather and sensor failures, and achieves nearly 3 times higher mAP at extended perception ranges.