US Patent 11188089 Localization for autonomous vehicles using gaussian mixture models

Systems, methods, and devices for determining a location of a vehicle or other device are disclosed. A method includes receiving sensor data from a sensor and determining a prior map comprising LIDAR intensity values. The method includes extracting a sub-region of the prior map around a hypothesis position of the sensor. The method includes extracting a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) distribution of intensity values for a region of the sensor data by expectation-maximization and calculating a log-likelihood for the sub-region of the prior map based on the GMM distribution of intensity values for the sensor data.