Mapping services in indoor environments based on image sequences

This paper describes a visual-based system that autonomously operators for both map building and localization tasks. The proposed system is to assist mapping services in small or mid-scale environments such as inside a building or campus of school where conventional positioning data such as GPS, WIFI signals are often not available. Toward this end, the proposed approaches utilize only visual data. We design an image acquisition system for data collections. On one hand, a robust visual odometry method is utilized to create routes in the environment. On the other hand, the proposed approaches utilize FAB-MAP (Fast Appearance Based Mapping) algorithm that is maybe the most successful for recognizing places in large scenarios. The building route and learning visited places are offline process in order to represent a map of environment. Through a matching image-to-map procedure, the captured images at current view are continuously positioned on the constructed map. This is an online process. The proposed system is evaluated in a corridor environment of a large building. The experimental results show that the constructed route coincides with ground truth, and matching image-to-map is high confidence. The proposed approaches are feasible to support visually impaired people navigating in the indoor environments.