Summarizing large scale 3D mesh for urban navigation

Cameras have become increasingly common in vehicles, smartphones, and advanced driver assistance systems. The areas of application of these cameras in the world of intelligent transportation systems are becoming more and more varied: pedestrian detection, line crossing detection, navigation, …A major area of research currently focuses on mapping that is essential for localization and navigation. However, this step generates an important problem of memory management. Indeed, the memory space required to accommodate the map of a small city is measured in tens gigabytes. In addition, several providers today are competing to produce High-Definition (HD) maps. These maps offer a rich and detailed representation of the environment for highly accurate localization. However, they require a large storage capacity and high transmission and update costs. To overcome these problems, we propose a solution to summarize this type of map by reducing the size while maintaining the relevance of the data for navigation based on vision only. The summary consists in a set of spherical images augmented by depth and semantic information and allowing to keep the same level of visibility in every directions. These spheres are used as landmarks to offer guidance information to a distant agent. They then have to guarantee, at a lower cost, a good level of precision and speed during navigation. Some experiments on real data demonstrate the feasibility for obtaining a summarized map while maintaining a localization with interesting performances.