Enhancing Inverse Perspective Mapping for Automatic Vectorized Road Map Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an improved, cost-effective framework for vectorized road map generation using enhanced inverse perspective mapping, which refines lane and ground markings with high accuracy and reduces mapping errors.

Contribution

It presents a novel unified framework that enhances IPM accuracy, refines vehicle poses, and generalizes road markings for automatic high-precision map generation.

Findings

Achieves near-centimeter-level accuracy in map generation.

Significantly reduces IPM mapping errors.

Improves vehicle pose estimation accuracy.

Abstract

In this study, we present a low-cost and unified framework for vectorized road mapping leveraging enhanced inverse perspective mapping (IPM). In this framework, Catmull-Rom splines are utilized to characterize lane lines, and all the other ground markings are depicted using polygons uniformly. The results from instance segmentation serve as references to refine the three-dimensional position of spline control points and polygon corner points. In conjunction with this process, the homography matrix of IPM and vehicle poses are optimized simultaneously. Our proposed framework significantly reduces the mapping errors associated with IPM. It also improves the accuracy of the initial IPM homography matrix and the predicted vehicle poses. Furthermore, it addresses the limitations imposed by the coplanarity assumption in IPM. These enhancements enable IPM to be effectively applied to vectorized road mapping, which serves a cost-effective solution with enhanced accuracy. In addition, our framework generalizes road map elements to include all common ground markings and lane lines. The proposed framework is evaluated in two different practical scenarios, and the test results show that our method can automatically generate high-precision maps with near-centimeter-level accuracy. Importantly, the optimized IPM matrix achieves an accuracy comparable to that of manual calibration, while the accuracy of vehicle poses is also significantly improved.