Digital map based pose improvement for outdoor Augmented Reality

With popularization of smart phones, needs for location based services (LBS), which is one of the most promising Augmented Reality applications, increased rapidly. However, accuracy of most commercially available Global Positioning Systems (GPS) is below levels for providing practically meaningful location based information. Especially when there are high building structures nearby, GPS location measurements are known to be erroneous and deviant. In this paper, we present a computer vision based method for improving user´s position and orientation for outdoor Augmented Reality with initial values obtained from a GPS and a digital compass. Given a digital map, our goal was to determine corresponding buildings visible in the camera image and improve the user location and orientation. In average, our method improved (14.4m, 3.3m) in position and 2.8 degrees in orientation. Our method is suitable for mobile services in urban environments where tall buildings degrade GPS signals.