On-body multi-input indoor localization for dynamic emergency scenarios: fusion of magnetic tracking and optical character recognition with mixed-reality display

Indoor navigation in emergency scenarios poses a challenge to evacuation and emergency support, especially for injured or physically encumbered individuals. Navigation systems must be lightweight, easy to use, and provide robust localization and accurate navigation instructions in adverse conditions. To address this challenge, we combine magnetic location tracking with an optical character recognition (OCR) and eye gaze based method to recognize door plates and position related text to provide more robust localization. In contrast to typical wireless or sensor based tracking, our fused system can be used in low-lighting, smoke, and areas without power or wireless connectivity. Eye gaze tracking is also used to improve time to localization and accuracy of the OCR algorithm. Once localized, navigation instructions are transmitted directly into the user's immediate field of view via head mounted display (HMD). Additionally, setting up the system is simple and can be done with minimal calibration, requiring only a walk-through of the environment and numerical annotation of a 2D area map. We conduct an evaluation for the magnetic and OCR systems individually to evaluate feasibility for use in the fused framework.