User Positioning Method Based on Image Similarity Comparison Using Single Camera

In this paper, user-position estimation method is proposed by using a single camera for both indoor and outdoor environments. Conventionally, the GPS of RF-based estimation methods have been widely studied in the literature for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively. Each method is useful only for indoor or outdoor environment. In this context, this study adopts a vision-based approach which can be commonly applicable to both environments. Since the distance or position cannot be extracted from a single still image, the reference images pro-stored in image database are used to identify the current position from the single still image captured by a single camera. The reference image is tagged with its captured position. To find the reference image which is the most similar to the current image, the SURF algorithm is used for feature extraction. The outliers in extracted features are discarded by using RANSAC algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for two buildings and their outsides for both indoor and outdoor environments, respectively.