LHMap-loc: Cross-Modal Monocular Localization Using LiDAR Point Cloud Heat Map

Localization using a monocular camera in the pre-built LiDAR point cloud map has drawn increasing attention in the field of autonomous driving and mobile robotics. However, there are still many challenges (e.g. difficulties of map storage, poor localization robustness in large scenes) in accurately and efficiently implementing cross-modal localization. To solve these problems, a novel pipeline termed LHMap-loc is proposed, which achieves accurate and efficient monocular localization in LiDAR maps. Firstly, feature encoding is carried out on the original LiDAR point cloud map by generating offline heat point clouds, by which the size of the original LiDAR map is compressed. Then, an end-to-end online pose regression network is designed based on optical flow estimation and spatial attention to achieve real-time monocular visual localization in a pre-built map. In addition, a series of experiments have been conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IRMVLab/LHMap-loc.