EXTRACTING LANDMARKS FOR CAR NAVIGATION SYSTEMS USING EXISTING GIS DATABASES AND LASER SCANNING

Abstract

Today’s car navigation systems provide driving instructions in the form of maps, pictograms, and spoken language. However, they are so far not able to support landmark-based navigation, which is the most natural navigation concept for humans and which also plays an important role for upcoming personal navigation systems. In order to provide such a navigation, the first step is to identify appropriate landmarks – a task that seems to be rather easy at first sight but turns out to be quite pretentious considering the challenge to deliver such information for databases covering huge areas of Europe, Northern America and Japan. In this paper, we show approaches to extract landmarks from existing GIS databases. Since these databases in general do not contain information on building heights and visibility, we show how this can be derived from laser scanning data.