Vision-HD: road change detection and registration using images and high-definition maps

High-definition (HD) maps are becoming increasingly important for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), as they provide detailed and accurate information about the road environment. Vision localization using HD maps can improve accuracy, but maps can become outdated. Image perception can be useful for HD map change detection. However, achieving robust and high-precision alignment between images and HD maps is challenging in varying environmental conditions. In addition, evaluating alignment in the absence of ground truth data is inconvenient. This article proposes a trajectory interpolation-based method for reconstructing lane markings from images to detect road changes when compared with the HD grid map. Images and HD maps are registered using a distance transform and cross-entropy-based optimization. The article also proposes a metric based on intersection over union for evaluating alignment accuracy. Experiments were conducted using a third-party-collected campus dataset and the Argoverse2 open-source dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in detecting road changes and achieving high-precision image and HD map fusion.