Smartphone-Based Indoor Map Construction

Principles and Applications

This book focuses on ubiquitous indoor localization services, specifically addressing the issue of floor plans. It combines computer vision algorithms and mobile techniques to reconstruct complete and accurate floor plans to provide better location-based services for both humans and vehicles via commodity smartphones in indoor environments (e.g., a multi-layer shopping mall with underground parking structures). After a comprehensive review of scene reconstruction methods, it offers accurate geometric information for each landmark from images and acoustics, and derives the spatial relationships of the landmarks and rough sketches of accessible areas with inertial and WiFi data to reduce computing overheads. It then presents the authors’ recent findings in detail, including the optimization and probabilistic formulations for more solid foundations and better robustness to combat errors, several new approaches to promote the current sporadic availability of indoor location-based services, and a holistic solution for floor plan reconstruction, indoor localization, tracking, and navigation. The novel approaches presented are designed for different types of indoor environments (e.g., shopping malls, office buildings and labs) and different users. A valuable resource for researchers and those in start-ups working in the field, it also provides supplementary material for students with mobile computing and networking backgrounds.