Crowd sourcing indoor maps with mobile sensors

Abstract

The paper describes algorithms required to enable the crowd sourcing of indoor building maps, i.e., where GPS is not available. Nevertheless to enable crowd sourcing we use the 3-axis accelerometers and the 3-axis magnetometers available in many smart phones and the piezometer in a Nike running shoe. Volunteers carry the sensors while walking around in buildings, and use some application on their smart phone to send the data to a mapping server. We present the algorithms to obtain walking trajectories from the data by dead reckoning, and to estimate indoor maps with multiple walking trajectories. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.