Automatic Generation and Application of Landmarks in Navigation Data Sets

Abstract

Landmark-based navigation is the most natural concept for humans to navigate themselves through their environment. It is desirable to incorporate this concept into car and personal navigation systems, which are nowadays based on distance and turn instructions. In this paper, an approach to identify landmarks automatically using existing GIS databases is introduced. By means of data mining methods, building information of the digital cadastral map of Germany is analyzed in order to identify landmarks. In a second step, a digital surface model obtained by laser scanning is used to assess the visibility of landmarks for a given route.