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Open Access Just Accepted
End-to-end Hierarchical Visual Localization with Rasterized and Vectorized HD Map
Communications in Transportation Research
Available online: 31 August 2026
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Accurate localization serves as an important component in autonomous driving systems. Traditional localization methods involve many standalone modules, which require complex hand-crafted rules and costly hyperparameter tuning by trial-and-error, therefore sacrificing the accuracy and generalization. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end visual localization approach, RAVE, in which the surrounding images are associated with the HD map data to estimate poses. To ensure high-quality observations for localization, a low-rank flow-based prior fusion module (FLORA) is developed to incorporate misaligned map prior into the perceived BEV features. Pursuing a balance among efficiency, interpretability, and accuracy, a hierarchical localization module is proposed, which efficiently estimates poses through a decoupled BEV neural matching-based pose solver (DEMA) using rasterized HD map, and then refines the estimation through a Transformer-based pose regressor (POET) using vectorized HD map. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can perform robust and accurate localization under varying environmental conditions while running efficiently. 

Open Access Research Article Issue
PriorFusion: Unified integration of priors for robust road perception in autonomous driving
Communications in Transportation Research 2025, 5(4): 100229
Published: 18 November 2025
Abstract PDF (14.5 MB) Collect
Downloads:39

With the growing interest in autonomous driving, there is an increasing demand for accurate and reliable road perception technologies. In complex environments without high-definition map support, autonomous vehicles must independently interpret their surroundings to ensure safe and robust decision-making. However, these scenarios pose significant challenges due to the large number, complex geometries, and frequent occlusions of road elements. A key limitation of existing approaches lies in their insufficient exploitation of the structured priors inherently present in road elements, resulting in irregular, inaccurate predictions. To address this, we propose PriorFusion, a unified framework that effectively integrates semantic, geometric, and generative priors to enhance road element perception. We introduce an instance-aware attention mechanism guided by shape-prior features, then construct a data-driven shape template space that encodes low-dimensional representations of road elements, enabling clustering to generate anchor points as reference priors. We design a diffusion-based framework that leverages these prior anchors to generate accurate and complete predictions. Experiments on large-scale autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves perception accuracy, particularly under challenging conditions. Visualization results further confirm that our approach produces more accurate, regular, and coherent predictions of road elements.

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