A Hybrid Positioning System for Indoor Navigation on Mobile Phones using Panoramic Images

In this paper, we propose a novel positioning system for indoor navigation which helps a user navigate easily to desired destinations in an unfamiliar indoor environment using his mobile phone. The system requires only the user’s mobile phone with its basic equipped sensors such as a camera and a compass. The system tracks user’s positions and orientations using a vision-based approach that utilizes 360o panoramic images captured in the environment. To improve the robustness of the vision-based method, we exploit a digital compass that is widely installed on modern mobile phones. This hybrid solution outperforms existing mobile phone positioning methods by reducing the error of position estimation to around 0.7 meters. In addition, to enable the proposed system working independently on mobile phone without the requirement of additional hardware or external infrastructure, we employ a modified version of a fast and robust feature matching scheme using Histogrammed Intensity Patch. The experiments show that the proposed positioning system achieves good performance while running on a mobile phone with a responding time of around 1 second.