Work

Loop-MapNet: A Multi-Modal HDMap Perception Framework with SDMap Dynamic Evolution and Priors

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: High-definition maps (HDMaps) are critical for safe autonomy on structured roads. Yet traditional production—relying on dedicated mapping fleets and manual quality control—is costly and slow, impeding large-scale, frequent updates. Recently, standard-definition maps (SDMaps) derived from remote sensing have been adopted as priors to support HDMap perception, lowering cost but struggling with subtle urban changes and localization drift. We propose Loop-MapNet, a self-evolving, multimodal, closed-loop mapping framework. Loop-MapNet effectively leverages surround-view images, LiDAR point clouds, and SDMaps; it fuses multi-scale vision via a weighted BiFPN, and couples PointPillars BEV and SDMap topology encoders for cross-modal sensing. A Transformer-based bidirectional adaptive cross-attention aligns SDMap with online perception, enabling robust fusion under heterogeneity. We further introduce a confidence-guided masked autoencoder (CG-MAE) that leverages confidence and probabilistic distillation to both capture implicit SDMap priors and enhance the detailed representation of low-confidence HDMap regions. With spatiotemporal consistency checks, Loop-MapNet incrementally updates SDMaps to form a perception–mapping–update loop, compensating remote-sensing latency and enabling online map optimization. On nuScenes, within 120 m, Loop-MapNet attains 61.05% mIoU, surpassing the best baseline by 0.77%. Under extreme localization errors, it maintains 60.46% mIoU, improving robustness by 2.77%; CG-MAE pre-training raises accuracy in low-confidence regions by 1.72%. These results demonstrate advantages in fusion and robustness, moving beyond one-way prior injection and enabling HDMap–SDMap co-evolution for closed-loop autonomy and rapid SDMap refresh from remote sensing.

Source: Applied Sciences

DOI: 10.3390/app152011160

Authors: Yuxuan Tang, Jie Hu, Daode Zhang, Wencai Xu, Feiyu Zhao, Xinghao Cheng

Institutions: Wuhan University of Technology, Hubei University of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization

Subfield: Aerospace Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896