DeepLocalization: Landmark-based Self-Localization with Deep Neural Networks

Abstract: We address the problem of vehicle self-localization from multi-modal sensor information and a reference map. The map is generated off-line by extracting landmarks from the vehicle's field of view, while the measurements are collected similarly on the fly. Our goal is to determine the autonomous vehicle's pose from the landmark measurements and map landmarks. To learn this mapping, we propose DeepLocalization, a deep neural network that regresses the vehicle's translation and rotation parameters from unordered and dynamic input landmarks. The proposed network architecture is robust to changes of the dynamic environment and can cope with a small number of extracted landmarks. During the training process we rely on synthetically generated ground-truth. In our experiments, we evaluate two inference approaches in real-world scenarios. We show that DeepLocalization can be combined with regular GPS signals and filtering algorithms such as the extended Kalman filter. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and is about ten times faster than the related work.