HDMapNet: A Local Semantic Map Learning and Evaluation Framework

Estimating local semantics from sensory inputs is a central component for high-definition map constructions in autonomous driving. However, traditional pipelines require a vast amount of human efforts and resources in annotating and maintaining the semantics in the map, which limits its scalability. In this paper, we introduce the problem of local semantic map learning, which dynamically constructs the vectorized semantics based on onboard sensor observations. Meanwhile, we introduce a local semantic map learning method, dubbed HDMapNet. HDMapNet encodes image features from surrounding cameras and/or point clouds from LiDAR, and predicts vectorized map elements in the bird's-eye view. We benchmark HDMapNet on nuScenes dataset and show that in all settings, it performs better than baseline methods. Of note, our fusion-based HDMapNet outperforms existing methods by more than 50% in all metrics. In addition, we develop semantic-level and instance-level metrics to evaluate the map learning performance. Finally, we showcase our method is capable of predicting a locally consistent map. By introducing the method and metrics, we invite the community to study this novel map learning problem. Code and evaluation kit will be released to facilitate future development.