Pano UMECHIKA: A crowded underground city panoramic view system

Abstract

Toward a really useful navigation system, utilizing spherical panoramic photos with maps like Google Street View is efficient. Users expect the system to be available in all areas they go. Conventional shooting methods obtain the shot position from GPS sensor. However, indoor areas are out of GPS range. Furthermore, most urban public indoor areas are crowded with pedestrians. Even if we blur the pedestrians in a photo, the photos with blurring are not useful for scenic information. Thus, we propose a method which simultaneously subtracts pedestrians based on background subtraction method and generates location metadata by manually input from maps. Using these methods, we achieved an underground panoramic view system which displays no pedestrians. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.