Self-Supervised Occupancy Grid Map Completion for Automated Driving

This paper investigates methods for enhancing the quality of occupancy grid maps (OGMs) using a combination of a self-supervised data generation procedure using only unlabeled data and a deep learning approach. OGMs are grid-structured environment representations, commonly used in automated driving systems to encode occupancy of the surrounding area. However, due to limited sensor range and resolution, their quality degrades significantly in distant and occluded areas, posing a challenge for a subsequent decision making. We introduce OGM completion, whose goal is to provide a more complete representation of the environment by extrapolating potential occupancy to distant and occluded areas. In particular, we propose and implement a complete framework for OGM completion. We develop a method for self-supervised data generation, identify an existing class of adoptable deep learning architectures, adapt loss functions and a quantitative performance metric, and derive a generic baseline method. Finally, we validate the functionality of the implemented framework by thorough experimentation and inspection of real-world examples of OGM completion in automated driving, significantly outperforming a baseline method.