Indoor Localization Using Computer Vision and Visual-Inertial Odometry

Indoor wayfinding is a major challenge for people with visual impairments, who are often unable to see visual cues such as informational signs, land-marks and structural features that people with normal vision rely on for wayfinding. We describe a novel indoor localization approach to facilitate wayfinding that uses a smartphone to combine computer vision and a dead reckoning technique known as visual-inertial odometry (VIO). The approach uses sign recognition to estimate the user's location on the map whenever a known sign is recognized, and VIO to track the user's movements when no sign is visible. The ad-vantages of our approach are (a) that it runs on a standard smartphone and re-quires no new physical infrastructure, just a digital 2D map of the indoor environment that includes the locations of signs in it; and (b) it allows the user to walk freely without having to actively search for signs with the smartphone (which is challenging for people with severe visual impairments). We report a formative study with four blind users demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and suggesting areas for future improvement.