SMART: Advancing Scalable Map Priors for Driving Topology Reasoning

1University of Southern California, 2Bosch Research North America, Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI), 3UC San Diego
* Work done while interned at Bosch Research North America
(Under review)


SMART

SMART augments online topology reasoning with robust map priors learned from scalable SD and satellite maps, substantially improving lane perception and topology reasoning.

Abstract

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving as it enables comprehensive understanding of connectivity and relationships between lanes and traffic elements. While recent approaches have shown success in perceiving driving topology using vehicle-mounted sensors, their scalability is hindered by the reliance on training data captured by consistent sensor configurations. We identify that the key factor in scalable lane perception and topology reasoning is the elimination of this sensor-dependent feature. To address this, we propose SMART, a scalable solution that leverages easily available standard-definition (SD) and satellite maps to learn a map prior model, supervised by large-scale geo-referenced high-definition (HD) maps independent of sensor settings. Attributing to scaled training, SMART alone achieves superior offline lane topology understanding using only SD and satellite inputs. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that SMART can be seamlessly integrated into any online topology reasoning method, yielding significant improvements by up to 28% on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark.


Outline of the proposed approach.

  • A simple yet effective architecture for map prior learning at scale, achieving impressive lane topology reasoning with SD and satellite inputs.
  • A map prior model that can be seamlessly integrated into any topology reasoning framework, enhancing robustness and generalizability.
  • Evaluations on the widely-used benchmark OpenLane-V2 underscore the effectiveness of SMART in advancing driving topology reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The source code of the proposed approach, along with the geospatial map fetching pipeline, will be made publicly available to facilitate future research.
  • Overall performance comparison on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark.

    Qualitative comparison of SMART-OL to baselines.


    Stats