Re-emission and satellite aerial maps applied to vehicle localization on urban environments

Vehicle localization in large-scale urban environments has been commonly addressed as a map-matching problem in the literature. Generally, the maps are 2D images of the world where each pixel covers a part of it. However, building maps for large-scale urban environments requires driving the vehicle along the desired path at least once. In order to simplify this task, in this work, we propose a new localization system that uses satellite aerial map-images available on the Internet to localize a vehicle in a complex urban environment. Satellite aerial map-images are compared against re-emission maps built from the infrared reflectance information of the vehicle´s LiDAR. Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) is used to compare re-emission and aerial map images. A Particle Filter Localization strategy is applied for vehicle´s localization. As a result, the system has an accuracy of 0.89m in a test course with 6.5km. Our system can be used continuously without losing track, and it works even in dark and partially occluded areas.