Continuous indoor/outdoor pathway display algorithm for pedestrian navigation service

Abstract

Over the last decade, pedestrian navigation services are gaining a high interest in guiding and tracking the user at any place. Outdoor, GPS persists as the navigation standard. Nevertheless, indoor navigation services, mainly developed to meet the need of a single floor building, are still under development stage. This paper introduces a novel algorithm that computes and displays the pathway, in a continuous manner, between two different points (i.e. source point and destination point) located inside a multi-floor building or outdoor. The calculated pathway is composed of two parts; the first part is displayed in the source floor and the second part is viewed in the destination floor. In cases where the source point and the destination point are in different floors and after displaying the first part of the pathway, the proposed algorithm automatically detects if the user is close to the destination floor based on the difference of altitudes. Therefore, the first part of the pathway is dropped and the second part is displayed. We conducted several real experiments, inside the campus of the University of Passau in Germany, to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. They yielded promising results in terms of continuity of navigation service and we achieved an accuracy in estimating the floor equal to 0.093 m.