Road-Network-Map-Assisted Vehicle Positioning Based on Pose Graph Optimization

Satellite signals are easily lost in urban areas, which causes difficulty in vehicles being located with high precision. Visual odometry has been increasingly applied in navigation systems to solve this problem. However, visual odometry relies on dead-reckoning technology, where a slight positioning error can accumulate over time, resulting in a catastrophic positioning error. Thus, this paper proposes a road-network-map-assisted vehicle positioning method based on the theory of pose graph optimization. This method takes the dead-reckoning result of visual odometry as the input and introduces constraints from the point-line form road network map to suppress the accumulated error and improve vehicle positioning accuracy. We design an optimization and prediction model, and the original trajectory of visual odometry is optimized to obtain the corrected trajectory by introducing constraints from map correction points. The vehicle positioning result at the next moment is predicted based on the latest output of the visual odometry and corrected trajectory. The experiments carried out on the KITTI and campus datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, which can provide stable and accurate vehicle position estimation in real-time, and has higher positioning accuracy than similar map-assisted methods.