We present a visual localization framework aided by novel deep attention aware features for autonomous driving that achieves centimeter level localization accuracy. Conventional approaches to the visual localization problem rely on handcrafted features or human-made objects on the road. They are known to be either prone to unstable matching caused by severe appearance or lighting changes, or too scarce to deliver constant and robust localization results in challenging scenarios. In this work, we seek to exploit the deep attention mechanism to search for salient, distinctive and stable features that are good for long-term matching in the scene through a novel end-to-end deep neural network. Furthermore, our learned feature descriptors are demonstrated to be competent to establish robust matches and therefore successfully estimate the optimal camera poses with high precision. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of our method using a freshly collected dataset with high-quality ground truth trajectories and hardware synchronization between sensors. Results demonstrate that our method achieves a competitive localization accuracy when compared to the LiDAR-based localization solutions under various challenging circumstances, leading to a potential low-cost localization solution for autonomous driving.

本文提出了一种基于深度注意力感知特征的视觉定位框架，可在自动驾驶中实现厘米级别的定位精度。通过使用新型端到端的深度神经网络，利用深度注意机制寻找显著、稳定性强的特征，以建立强鲁棒性的匹配，并成功估计高精度的相机姿态。经过大量的实验验证，证明了我们的方法在各种挑战性场景下，都能够达到非常具有竞争力的定位精度，这为未来自动驾驶的低成本定位解决方案提供了新的可能性。

DA4AD：面向自主驾驶的端到端深度注意力视觉定位