Administrator by China Associction for Science and Technology
Sponsored by China Society of Automotive Engineers
Published by AUTO FAN Magazine Co. Ltd.

Automotive Engineering ›› 2023, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (9): 1543-1552.doi: 10.19562/j.chinasae.qcgc.2023.09.004

Special Issue: 智能网联汽车技术专题-感知&HMI&测评2023年

Previous Articles     Next Articles

Tag-Based Vehicle Visual SLAM in Sparse Feature Scenes

Hongmao Qin1,2,Guoli Shen1,Yunshui Zhou1(),Shengjie Huang1,Xiaohui Qin1,2,Guotao Xie1,2,Rongjun Ding1,2   

  1. 1.College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering,Hunan University,Changsha 410082
    2.Wuxi Intelligent Control Research Institute of Hunan University,Wuxi 214072
  • Received:2023-01-08 Revised:2023-02-24 Online:2023-09-25 Published:2023-09-23
  • Contact: Yunshui Zhou E-mail:zhouys@hnu.edu.cn

Abstract:

In the simultaneous localization and mapping of intelligent vehicles, the visual feature point method estimates the vehicle’s pose through extraction and matching of feature points. However, when the environment lacks texture or dynamic changes, due to sparse scene features and poor stability, localization by natural features possibly declines in accuracy or even fails. Adding visual tags in the environment can effectively solve the problem of feature sparsity. But the localization methods based on visual tags highly rely on manual calibration, and the poses often jitter due to perspective changes, which affects the precision of localization. Therefore, this paper proposes a tag-based vehicle visual SLAM method, which makes full use of tag information, introduces in internal and external corner constraints to reduce the pose jitter of the tag and establishes a low drift, globally consistent tag map with the visual odometer. The vehicle pose estimated by tags and the tag map are jointly optimized in localization to build a low-cost and highly robust visual SLAM system. The test results show that the proposed method with internal and external corner constraints effectively reduces the pose jitter of the tag, improves the mapping accuracy by more than 60% and the accuracy of localization by more than 30%, which significantly increases the accuracy and robustness of tag-based localization and is conducive to the safe operation of intelligent vehicles.

Key words: intelligent driving, simultaneous localization and mapping, image feature, visual tag, map consistency