Graph-based markerless registration of city maps using geometric hashing

Recently, augmenting paper maps with additional dynamic information on mobile devices has become popular. A central task in this context is to register high-resolution paper maps to digital maps on a mobile device, which was typically performed by means of RFID tags or visual markers on specially prepared paper maps. In this paper we present a novel graph-based approach for a markerless registration of city maps. The goal is to find the best registration between a given image, which shows a small part of a city map, and stored map data. The proposed method creates a graph representation of a given input image and robustly finds an optimal registration using a geometric hashing technique. It is translation, scale and rotation invariant, and robust against noise and missing data. Experiments on both synthetic and real data are presented to demonstrate the algorithmic performance.