Indoor Positioning and Navigation with Camera Phones

This low-cost indoor navigation system runs on off-the-shelf camera phones. More than 2,000 users at four different large-scale events have already used it. The system uses built-in cameras to determine user location in real time by detecting unobtrusive fiduciary markers. The required infrastructure is limited to paper markers and static digital maps, and common devices are used, facilitating quick deployment in new environments. The authors have studied the application quantitatively in a controlled environment and qualitatively during deployment at four large international events. According to test users, marker-based navigation is easier to use than conventional mobile digital maps. Moreover, the users' location awareness in navigation tasks improved. Experiences drawn from questionnaires, usage log data, and user interviews further highlight the benefits of this approach.

Indoor Navigation and Localization

There is a large body of work on indoor navigation in robotics. Guilherme DeSouza and Avinash Kak provide a good overview.¹ These systems commonly harness a robot's controlled position and movements and try to detect its pose using natural-feature tracking based on cameras or range sensors. However, such algorithms exceed what is currently possible on mobile phones.