A Quantitative Evaluation Method of Landmark Effectiveness for Pedestrian Navigation

In recent years, most of mobile phones have a function of pedestrian navigation guidance. Even though performance of the function has been improved with Global Positioning System (GPS) and high information and communication technologies, it was reported that users sometimes feel anxiety because of low accuracy of the position estimation especially in urban area and delay of information updating. The purpose of our work is to propose pedestrian navigation method to reduce anxiety of users. We propose evaluation functions to estimate various landmarks' effectiveness based on the "recognizability", and "visibility", and a route planning algorism for safe and easy way finding. The estimation model was constructed through several cognitive experiments about recognizability and visibility for different types of landmarks.