Management of Landmarks in a GIS for an Enhanced Localisation in Urban Areas

This paper addresses the problem of localizing a vehicle in urban environment by using natural information provided by exteroceptive sensors. For this purpose, sensors need to detect landmarks which have been characterized in a previous passage. As the amount of data can be significantly large, we propose a strategy to manage this information in a GIS (geographical information system). We illustrate our developments using visual landmarks made of key images and 3D points that are regrouped in local maps that correspond to the roads of a GIS layer thanks to the use of GPS data and proprioceptive sensors. Real experiments are reported to illustrate the performance of this approach which is robust to GPS outages due to poor satellite visibility in urban areas