A high definition (HD) map in the context of highly automated vehicles is a digital map which contains precise information (error < 1m) necessary for localization and for driving behavior:

* **road geometry**: Where is the road, where are lanes?
* **[street furniture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_furniture)**: street signs, traffic lights
* **dynamic data**: end of traffic jam, construction work

This kind of information can be stored in the [OpenDRIVE format](http://www.opendrive.org/docs/OpenDRIVEFormatSpecRev1.1D.pdf), which is an XML format with the extension `.xodr`.

Creating and maintaining those maps is costly with dedicated cars, so we would like to have an alternative which works automatically. This paper proposes one. **The best summary of the paper is Figure 3.**

## Possible Sensors

The following kind of sensors can be equipped in many cars:

* stereo cameras
* radar
* GPS

## Active Players

* **Continental** Road Database: Automatic Recording and Processing of Highly Accurate Route Data
* [HERE](https://www.here.com/en): map provider which has published a sensor interface specification: “Vehicle Sensor Data Cloud Ingestion Interface
Specification (v2.0.2)

## See also

* [Inferring road maps from global positioning system traces - Survey and comparative evaluation](https://www.cs.uic.edu/~jakob/papers/biagioni-trr12.pdf)
* [Hochgenaue Fahrzeugeigenlokalisierung und kollektives Erlernen hochgenauer digitaler Karten]()