Multi-Session Visual Roadway Mapping

This paper proposes an algorithm for camera based roadway mapping in urban areas. With a convolutional neural network the roadway is detected in images taken by a camera mounted in the vehicle. The detected roadway masks from all images of one driving session are combined according to their corresponding GPS position to create a probabilistic grid map of the roadway. Finally, maps from several driving sessions are merged by a feature matching algorithm to compensate for errors in the roadway detection and localization inaccuracies. Hence, this approach utilizes solely low-cost sensors common in usual production vehicles and can generate highly detailed roadway maps from crowd-sourced data.