L2G-Map: Local-to-Global Mapping via Hierarchical Diffusion Refinement and Elliptical Bayesian Fusion
Authors: Siyu Li, Xinying Hong, Fei Teng, Kang Zeng, Hao Shi, Beiping Hou, Zhiyong Li, Kailun Yang
Abstract
Offline high-definition maps provide essential geometric and topological priors for autonomous driving systems. Pure-vision solutions have become the predominant paradigm for offline mapping due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability. However, local-to-global mapping under visual conditions confronts two fundamental challenges: single-shot local observations are susceptible to viewpoint variation and environmental interference, leading to geometric deviations, while multi-source local information exhibits heterogeneous confidence, rendering globally consistent aggregation difficult. To address these, this paper proposes L2G-Map, a framework comprising hierarchical prior diffusion refinement and elliptical space Bayesian fusion. The former jointly embeds temporal context and centerline priors to guide structure completion and topology recovery during denoising, alleviating the information incompleteness inherent in pure-vision settings. The latter incorporates an adaptive weighting strategy driven by elliptical distance propagation, enabling probabilistically optimal aggregation of multi-source information under the Bayesian posterior update paradigm. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of L2G-Map. The proposed refinement component yields consistent local map accuracy improvements across different datasets. Under sensor-degraded conditions, a 3.27% mIoU gain is achieved. Furthermore, the adaptive fusion component significantly enhances the accuracy of global maps. The fused global map can be flexibly embedded into different online map models, yielding an 18.26% mIoU improvement in semantic map construction and a 20.00% enhancement in vectorized map construction, demonstrating the overall advantages of the proposed closed-loop pipeline. Source code will be available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/L2G-Map.
Autonomous driving systems benefit from high-definition (HD) maps that provide critical information about road infrastructure. The online construction of HD maps offers a scalable approach to generate local vectorized maps from onboard sensor observations. Existing methods commonly adopt bird's-eye-view (BEV) features as the intermediate scene representation, encoding the surrounding space with fixed-resolution dense grids. However, map elements are spatially sparse yet require fine-grained geometric localization, making uniformly allocated BEV representations redundant and less effective for vectorized map prediction. In this work, we propose GaussianMap, an online HD map construction framework that learns an adaptive Gaussian representation of the surrounding scene. This representation consists of a set of Gaussian primitives on the BEV plane, each encoding a flexible local region with geometric properties and a feature vector, allowing the model to allocate representational capacity to map-relevant regions. To generate such a representation from sensor observations, we introduce a feed-forward Gaussian encoder that progressively refines these primitives through Gaussian interaction modeling and multi-sensor feature aggregation. The refined Gaussian representation is then splatted into a BEV feature map and decoded into vectorized map predictions. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrate that GaussianMap achieves state-of-the-art performance in both camera-only and camera-LiDAR fusion settings. Our code will be made publicly available.
Hongyu Lyu, Julie Stephany Berrio Perez, Mao Shan +1
Accurate High-Definition (HD) map construction is critical for autonomous driving, yet existing methods face a fundamental trade-off: vectorization-based approaches preserve topology but struggle with geometric fidelity, while rasterization-based approaches enable precise geometric supervision but produce unstructured outputs. To bridge this gap, we propose GSMap, a novel framework that unifies both paradigms via a learnable 2D Gaussian representation. Each map element is modeled as an ordered sequence of 2D Gaussians, whose centers correspond to the vertices of the vectorized polyline/polygon. This formulation enables simultaneous optimization through: (1) Differentiable rasterization that enforces pixel-level geometric constraints, and (2) Topology-aware vectorization that maintains structural regularity. Experiments on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 demonstrate that our Gaussian-based representation effectively unifies geometric and topological learning, achieving significant performance improvements and demonstrating strong compatibility with existing HD mapping architectures. Code will be available at https://github.com/peakpang/GSMap
Offline vectorized maps constitute critical infrastructure for high-precision autonomous driving and mapping services. Existing approaches rely predominantly on single ego-vehicle trajectories, which fundamentally suffer from viewpoint insufficiency: while memory-based methods extend observation time by aggregating ego-trajectory frames, they lack the spatial diversity needed to reveal occluded regions. Incorporating views from surrounding vehicles offers complementary perspectives, yet naive fusion introduces three key challenges: computational cost from large candidate pools, redundancy from near-collinear viewpoints, and noise from pose errors and occlusion artifacts. We present OptiMVMap, which reformulates multi-vehicle mapping as a select-then-fuse problem to address these challenges systematically. An Optimal Vehicle Selection (OVS) module strategically identifies a compact subset of helpers that maximally reduce ego-centric uncertainty in occluded regions, addressing computation and redundancy challenges. Cross-Vehicle Attention (CVA) and Semantic-aware Noise Filter (SNF) then perform pose-tolerant alignment and artifact suppression before BEV-level fusion, addressing the noise challenge. This targeted pipeline yields more complete and topologically faithful maps with substantially fewer views than indiscriminate aggregation. On nuScenes and Argoverse2, OptiMVMap improves MapTRv2 by +10.5 mAP and +9.3 mAP, respectively, and surpasses memory-augmented baselines MVMap and HRMapNet by +6.2 mAP and +3.8 mAP on nuScenes. These results demonstrate that uncertainty-guided selection of helper vehicles is essential for efficient and accurate multi-vehicle vectorized mapping. The code is released at https://github.com/DanZeDong/OptiMVMap.