A two-dimensional pedestrian navigation solution aided with a visual gyroscope and a visual odometer

Integration of different positioning systems such as wireless local area networks (WLAN) and INS has proven to be the most promising approach for navigation in global navigation satellite system challenging environments. However, the integrated solution suffers from the errors induced by the sensors in the INS and the low availability and infrastructure dependency of the WLAN. Visual aiding is a complementary method for augmenting these systems, because it suffers from errors and availability problems of a different nature. We introduce the concept of a “visual gyroscope” and a “visual odometer,” based on recovering user information by tracking the feature motion between consecutive images. All calculations are of sufficiently low complexity to be adoptable for navigation with current smartphones. The camera orientation is observed using the vanishing point locations, and this information is transformed into user heading change information and also used for visual odometer calculations. The visual odometer retrieves the camera translation information based on a special camera configuration and the motion of the matched scale-invariant feature transform features. The performance of both of these tools is evaluated. Experiments in selected environments have proven that visual aiding with a visual gyroscope and visual odometer improves the two-dimensional navigation solution significantly.