Map Matching-Based Driving Lane Recognition for Low-Cost Precise Vehicle Positioning on Highways

This paper proposes a map matching-based driving lane recognition system for low-cost precise vehicle positioning on highways. The proposed method finds the position where the road boundaries detected by a LIDAR sensor are best matched with the road boundaries of the precise digital map and then recognizes the driving lane based on the position. To improve the limitations of the existing Chamfer matching method, this paper proposes the following two methods. The first is a method of generating one candidate position for each lane by using the lane information of the map and the left and right lane offsets obtained from the front camera. Second is a simple matching method that converts the LIDAR and map data into arrays and compares only the lateral distances to measure the matching score. In addition, this paper proposes a method for maintaining sufficient road boundary information in every frame by applying a temporal accumulation to the LIDAR data. In the experiment, the proposed method was quantitatively evaluated using a database acquired from sensors mounted on a real vehicle on highways. The experimental results show that the driving lane recognition rate is 99.56%, the lateral position error is 0.49m, and the processing time is 6.4ms. These results prove that the proposed system provides sufficient accuracy and reliability even in the presence of GPS position errors in various highway environments.