Lightweight Semantic-Aided Localization With Spinning LiDAR Sensor

Autonomous driving demands robust and precise vehicle localization in complex environments with limited on-board computational resources. Incorporating reliable semantic information with localization algorithms can increase accuracy remarkably, however, the process of extracting semantic information from LiDAR point clouds and matching it to semantic maps is computationally intensive. Moreover, pure semantic localization cannot achieve the robustness requirements for safe self-driving as the necessary quantity of semantic landmarks cannot be guaranteed under extreme conditions. In this paper, we present a lightweight semantic-aided localization method that improves upon traditional techniques in two ways. First, we propose a highly efficient pipeline to extract three semantic classes from a LiDAR scan. Second, instead of semantic 3D point cloud registration, map matching is performed through 2D key point matching. We then integrate these two functions into a dynamic semantic aided localization framework. Our on-road experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves both the high accuracy of semantic localization and the robustness of non-semantic localization. With our algorithm consuming under 10% of CPU resources, we observe reduced positioning error, especially peak error, when comparing to non-semantic counterparts.