BDLoc: Global Localization from 2.5D Building Map

Robust and accurate global 6DoF localization is essential for many applications, i.e., augmented reality and autonomous driving. Most existing 6DoF visual localization approaches need to build a dense texture model in advance, which is computationally extensive and almost infeasible in the global range. In this work, we propose BDLoc, a hierarchical global localization framework via the 2.5D building map, which is able to estimate the accurate pose of the query street-view image without using detailed dense 3D model and texture information. Specifically speaking, we first extract the 3D building information from the street-view image and surrounding 2.5D building map, and then solve a coarse relative pose by local to global registration. In order to improve the feature extraction, we propose a novel SPG-Net which is able to capture both local and global features. Finally, an iterative semantic alignment is applied to obtain a finner result with the differentiable rendering and the cross-view semantic constraint. Except for a coarse longitude and latitude from GPS, BDLoc doesn’t need any additional information like altitude and orientation that are necessary for many previous works. We also create a large dataset to explore the performance of the 2.5D map-based localization task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method.