# RTMap: Real-Time Recursive Mapping with Change Detection and Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00980 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00980/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [MapTR: Structured Modeling and Learning for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14437/) (2022)
- [HDMapNet: An Online HD Map Construction and Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06307/) (2021)
- [VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08920/) (2022)
- [MapTRv2: An End-to-End Framework for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05736/) (2023)
- [StreamMapNet: Streaming Mapping Network for Vectorized Online HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12570/) (2023)
- [On-Manifold Preintegration for Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02363/) (2015)
- [Efficient and Robust 2D-to-BEV Representation Learning via Geometry-guided Kernel Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04584/) (2022)
- [Neural Map Prior for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08481/) (2023)
- [MapTracker: Tracking with Strided Memory Fusion for Consistent Vector HD Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15951/) (2024)
- [Augmenting Lane Perception and Topology Understanding with Standard Definition Navigation Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04079/) (2023)
- [LaneSegNet: Map Learning with Lane Segment Perception for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16108/) (2023)
- [P-MapNet: Far-seeing Map Generator Enhanced by both SDMap and HDMap Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10521/) (2024)
- [MGMap: Mask-Guided Learning for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00876/) (2024)
- [Producing and Leveraging Online Map Uncertainty in Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16439/) (2024)
- [Trust, but Verify: Cross-Modality Fusion for HD Map Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07312/) (2022)
- [MapNeRF: Incorporating Map Priors into Neural Radiance Fields for Driving View Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14981/) (2023)
- [U-BEV: Height-aware Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation and Neural Map-based Relocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13766/) (2023)
- [BEV-Locator: An End-to-end Visual Semantic Localization Network Using Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14927/) (2022)
- [PrevPredMap: Exploring Temporal Modeling with Previous Predictions for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17378/) (2024)
- [EgoVM: Achieving Precise Ego-Localization using Lightweight Vectorized Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08991/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Monocular Re-Localization: From the Perspective of Scene Map Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15643/) (2023)
- [DTCLMapper: Dual Temporal Consistent Learning for Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05518/) (2024)
- [THMA: Tencent HD Map AI System for Creating HD Map Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11123/) (2022)
- [Exploring Real World Map Change Generalization of Prior-Informed HD Map Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01961/) (2024)
- [LDMapNet-U: An End-to-End System for City-Scale Lane-Level Map Updating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02763/) (2025)
- [Road Mapping and Localization using Sparse Semantic Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05047/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [The Semantic Lifecycle in Embodied AI: Acquisition, Representation and Storage via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08876/) (2026)
- [FlexMap: Robust HD Map Construction under Flexible Camera Configurations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22376/) (2026)
- [MapGCLR: Geospatial Contrastive Learning of Representations for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10688/) (2026)
- [GSMap: 2D Gaussians for Online HD Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09619/) (2026)
- [Driving on Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31029/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While recent online HD mapping methods relieve burdened offline pipelines and solve map freshness, they remain limited by perceptual inaccuracies, occlusion in dense traffic, and an inability to fuse multi-agent observations. We propose RTMap to enhance these single-traversal methods by persistently crowdsourcing a multi-traversal HD map as a self-evolutional memory. On onboard agents, RTMap simultaneously addresses three core challenges in an end-to-end fashion: (1) Uncertainty-aware positional modeling for HD map elements, (2) probabilistic-aware localization w.r.t. the crowdsourced prior-map, and (3) real-time detection for possible road structural changes. Experiments on several public autonomous driving datasets demonstrate our solid performance on both the prior-aided map quality and the localization accuracy, demonstrating our effectiveness of robustly serving downstream prediction and planning modules while gradually improving the accuracy and freshness of the crowdsourced prior-map asynchronously. Our source-code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/CN-ADLab/RTMap.
