Detection of Localization Failures Using Markov Random Fields With Fully Connected Latent Variables for Safe LiDAR-Based Automated Driving

Most of the recent automated driving systems assume the accurate functioning of localization. Unanticipated errors cause localization failures and result in failures in automated driving. An exact localization failure detection is necessary to ensure safety in automated driving; however, detection of the localization failures is challenging because sensor measurement is assumed to be independent of each other in the localization process. Owing to the assumption, the entire relation of the sensor measurement is ignored. Consequently, it is difficult to recognize the misalignment between the sensor measurement and the map when partial sensor measurement overlaps with the map. This paper proposes a method for the detection of localization failures using Markov random fields with fully connected latent variables. The full connection enables to take the entire relation into account and contributes to the exact misalignment recognition. Additionally, this paper presents localization failure probability calculation and efficient distance field representation methods. We evaluate the proposed method using two types of datasets. The first dataset is the SemanticKITTI dataset, whereby four methods are compared with the proposed method. The comparison results reveal that the proposed method achieves the most accurate failure detection. The second dataset is created based on log data acquired from the demonstrations that we conducted in Japanese public roads. The dataset includes several localization failure scenes. We apply the failure detection methods to the dataset and confirm that the proposed method achieves exact and immediate failure detection.