Indoor localization and navigation using smartphones augmented reality and inertial tracking

Abstract

Over the last years, indoor localization and navigation is becoming a hot topic. With the increasing number of buildings, indoor positioning and navigation has turned out to be more important than outdoors. In the literature, many papers discuss wireless based indoor positioning systems. Essentially based on Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or existing solutions that imply the measurement of radio signals. In this paper, we evaluate an indoor image-based positioning system that takes advantage of smartphones augmented reality (AR) and inertial tracking. The excellent computing capabilities in todays highend phones or smartphones in combination with its resources of sensors, such as Global Positioning System (GPS), inertial sensors, camera, wireless receivers, are powering the mobile application sector to the extent of becoming the fastest growing one in data communication technologies. AR as an emerging technology has the potential of creating new types of indoor location based services for the near future. Here, we show some of the AR capabilities combined with inertial tracking for localization and navigation.