In-building navigation system using a camera

A top-view map of building floor is still used nowadays by a visitor for in-building navigation. Its practicality heavily relies on the user´s skill in matching a current position on the map. When the map is installed at a fixed position, not held in hand, the position of the map itself can be marked in the map, allowing the user to know the current position. Searching for the map itself, however, is still a necessary task. An orientation of the user is another issue of this traditional approach. It can be solved by having one more map point matched with the corresponding physical position on the floor. People with a good sense of direction have no difficulties with this conventional in-building navigation, but neither do the others. This paper uses the PTAM (parallel tracking and mapping - one type of visual simultaneous localization and mapping, SLAM) as a base system in which a camera is the only sensor. Two map points and their corresponding real position are used for registration of the camera pose acquired from PTAM with the top-view map coordinates. The top-view map of current floor is the only thing obtained in advance. Experimental results show that the proposed monocular navigation system can be used to navigate in the building in real-time, which helps the user correctly decide the route to the destination, similar to a GPS system used for the vehicle navigation.