Indoor Mapping and Positioning using Augmented Reality

Location-based services are becoming an important part of life and there is an increasing demand for indoor positioning. Combination of GPS and mobile cellular networks has solved the problem for outdoor environments. However, the same level of precision has not been achieved for indoor location estimation. The problem of locating an indoor environment has been studied only recently. Much research contributed to the innovative concept of an indoor positioning system. Considering the cost and the effort involved in the existing location estimation approaches, Augmented Reality (AR) based positioning method is one of the most promising methods to determine the location of a mobile device. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose, implement, and evaluate an AR-based location estimation smartphone application that can be used indoors. The evaluation results show indicate that the proposed application can estimate the location in small areas with an error-rate of 0.31 meters and in large areas with error-rate of 7.8 meters.)