HDMapNet: An Online HD Map Construction and Evaluation Framework

Constructing HD semantic maps is a central component of autonomous driving. However, traditional pipelines require a vast amount of human efforts and resources in annotating and maintaining the semantics in the map, which limits its scalability. In this paper, we introduce the problem of HD semantic map learning, which dynamically constructs the local semantics based on onboard sensor observations. Meanwhile, we introduce a semantic map learning method, dubbed HDMapNet. HDMapNet encodes image features from surrounding cameras and/or point clouds from LiDAR, and predicts vectorized map elements in the bird's-eye view. We benchmark HDMapNet on nuScenes dataset and show that in all settings, it performs better…