Lane-Level Road Map Construction considering Vehicle Lane-Changing Behavior

In recent years, the construction of lane-level road maps has received extensive attention from industry and academia. It has been widely studied because this kind of map provides the foundation for much research, such as high-precision navigation, driving behavior analysis, and traffic analysis. Trajectory-based crowd-mapping is an emerging approach to lane-level map construction. However, the major problem is that existing methods neglect modeling the trajectory distribution in the longitudinal direction of the road, which significantly impacts precision. Thus, this article proposes a two-stage method based on vehicle lane-changing behavior to model the road's lateral and longitudinal trajectory distributions simultaneously. In the first stage, lane-changing behaviors are extracted from vehicle trajectories. In the second stage, the lane extraction model is established using the weighted constrained Gaussian mixture model and hidden Markov model to estimate lane parameters (e.g., lane counts and lane centerline) on each road cross section. Then accurate and continuous lane centerlines can be constructed accordingly. The proposed method is verified using vehicle trajectory data collected from the crowdsourced platform named Mapillary. The results show that the proposed method can construct lane-level road information satisfactorily.