Real-Time Point Cloud Alignment for Vehicle Localization in a High Resolution 3D Map

In this paper we introduce a Lidar based real time and accurate self localization approach for self driving vehicles (SDV) in high resolution 3D point cloud maps of the environment obtained through Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS). Our solution is able to robustly register the sparse point clouds of the SDVs to the dense MLS point cloud data, starting from a GPS based initial position estimation of the vehicle. The main steps of the method are robust object extraction and transformation estimation based on multiple keypoints extracted from the objects, and additional semantic information derived from the MLS based map. We tested our approach on roads with heavy traffic in the downtown of a large city with large GPS positioning errors, and showed that the proposed method enhances the matching accuracy with an order of magnitude. Comparative tests are provided with various keypoint selection strategies, and against a state-of-the-art technique.