Landmark-based Navigation in Complex Buildings

Growing numbers of mobile devices in our daily life and their capability to fulfill challenging computational tasks raise the question about new application fields beyond well-established tasks. While outdoor navigation became a standard task for many mobile devices, indoor positioning and navigation is still in the research and development stage. Even though complex buildings require aided guidance for visitors, today's mobile hardware is not able to deliver a reliable indoor navigation system. In this paper we describe a novel information system for indoor navigation in complex buildings. Users are guided through the building by using images of the surroundings and textual instructions. We avoid hardware-based user positioning due to its known drawbacks. Instead, users are involved into the navigation process and complete missing information through recognized context and logical constrains of their surroundings. The human navigation process based on recognition of certain unique locations and visual clues is the foundation of this work. The proposed system is universally applicable without restrictions on navigation devices or existing hardware in the building.