A Survey on Map Based Localization Techniques for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles integrate complex software stacks for realizing the necessary iterative perception, planning, and action operations. One of the foundational layers of such stacks is the perception one which is comprised of localization, detection, and recognition algorithms for understanding the location and the driving environment around the vehicle. More precisely, localization aims to identify the location of the vehicle on a global coordinate system and is considered one of the most critical parts in the stack since its accuracy and robustness affects the subsequent algorithms of the perception layer and also the following planning and action layers. Due to the rapid and significant interest in self-driving cars, several localization techniques have been proposed with different directions and approaches. Algorithms using prior maps are currently considered the most accurate ones and found almost in all current self-driving car prototypes. Thus, in this paper, we categorize, discuss and analyze the state-of-the-art map-based localization techniques in an attempt to examine their potentials and limitations. We first present techniques and approaches that aim to match prior maps with on-board observations from different sensor modalities. We then review methods that handle the localization problem as a probabilistic one and finally, we also go through the emerging domain of deep-learning localization algorithms and examine their potential in self-driving cars. For all three categories, we provide comparison tables and necessary insights for the optimal localization system design based on different requirements, specifications, and sensor configurations.