SIBCL: Satellite Image Based Cross-view Localization for Autonomous Vehicle

Australian National University, CSIRO, Ford Motor Company
ICRA 2023

SIBCL Mothed Introduction.

Method Overview

Overview of SIBCL. GaFE extracts feature and attention maps from the ground and satellite views. Further, we obtain sparse pixel-level features and weights across the 3D points. The pose-aware features extraction is supervised in PAB by a triplet loss. In RPRB, the deep features are used to iteratively optimize the camera pose using the LM algorithm.

Teaser

Abstract

Existing spatial localization techniques for autonomous vehicles mostly use a pre-built 3D-HD map, often constructed using a survey-grade 3D mapping vehicle, which is not only expensive but also laborious. This paper shows that by using an off-the-shelf high-definition satellite image as a ready-to-use map, we are able to achieve cross-view vehicle localization up to a satisfactory accuracy, providing a cheaper and more practical way for localization. While the utilization of satellite imagery for cross-view localization is an established concept, the conventional methodology focuses primarily on image retrieval. This paper introduces a novel approach to cross-view localization that departs from the conventional image retrieval method. Specifically, our method develops (1) a Geometric-align Feature Extractor (GaFE) that leverages measured 3D points to bridge the geometric gap between ground and overhead views, (2) a Pose Aware Branch (PAB) adopting a triplet loss to encourage pose-aware feature extraction, and (3) a Recursive Pose Refine Branch (RPRB) using the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm to align the initial pose towards the true vehicle pose iteratively. Our method is validated on KITTI and Ford Multi-AV Seasonal datasets as ground view and Google Maps as the satellite view. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method in cross-view localization with median spatial and angular errors within 1 meter and 1 degree, respectively.

Comparison

Teaser

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang2023satellite,
  title={Satellite image based cross-view localization for autonomous vehicle},
  author={Wang, Shan and Zhang, Yanhao and Vora, Ankit and Perincherry, Akhil and Li, Hengdong},
  booktitle={2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={3592--3599},
  year={2023},
  organization={IEEE}
}