The current state of the art in automotive high definition digital (HD) map generation based on dedicated mapping vehicles cannot reliably keep these maps up to date because of the low traversal frequencies. Anonymized data collected from the fleet of vehicles that is already on the road provides a huge potential to outperform such state of the art solutions in robustness, safety and up-to-dateness of the map while achieving comparable quality. We thus present a solution based on crowdsourced data to (i) detect changes in the map independent of the type of change, (ii) automatically trigger map update jobs for parts of the map, and (iii) create and integrate map patches to keep the map always up to date. The developed solution provides a crowdsourced up to date HD map to make reliable prior information on lane markings and road edges available to automated driving functions.

In this paper, we present a change detection algorithm that can run in real time as part of a backend-based stream processing pipeline. It can process the floating car data collected by series-production vehicles to detect changes in an automotive high definition digital (HD) map used for automated driving. The algorithm uses a particle filter approach with odometry, GNSS and landmark readings to localize the vehicle within the digital map. While all particles together represent the probability distribution for the vehicle’s position at a given time, each individual particle also serves as a hypothesis about the vehicle’s position. This is used to compute various metrics for how well the current sensor readings match the world model encoded in the HD map. The different metrics are evaluated by a number of weak classifiers that are used as input for a trained Adaboost classifier. The achievable detection rate of a single vehicle is then compared to that of a simple crowd-based approach, where each vehicle votes on whether or not the current section of the road has changed.

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that derives lane marking maps from crowdsourced data. We process the data in four steps: (i) We make use of a point landmark map and, if available, an existent lane marking map for trajectory optimization and alignment, (ii) use a custom DBSCAN variant to cluster observations that belong to the same lane marking, (iii) apply a novel graph fitting approach to extract lane marking dashes, lines and even complex structures such as splits and merges and (iv) optimize the graph geometry with domain knowledge. The process of point-landmark- and lane marking-based trajectory alignment and the lane marking derivation is repeated iteratively to improve the results. Evaluation is carried out on a 9km highway section by comparison with high accuracy aerial photographs and manually labeled ground truth lane markings.

In this work, we propose a method to create crowdsourced HD map patches based on road model inference and graph-based SLAM. As input data, we use higher level features such as lane marking and traffic sign observations that, in near future, will also be available from a newly developed floating car data collection solution. We process the data in four steps: (i) we apply smoothing based on GPS and odometry readings, (ii) align the resulting traces based on common observations of 3D point landmarks, (iii) find the lane marking configuration sequence along the road by discrete optimization and (iv) use that sequence to associate lane marking observations with lane marking entities to obtain their geometry. The results are evaluated by comparison with a ground truth HD map. Based on a total of 29 km of learned road segments, the average absolute distance between learned lane marking positions and those in the map is 0.306 m.