A Vision-based Indoor Positioning System on Shopping Mall Context

With the help of a map and GPS, outdoor navigation from one spot to another can be done quickly and well. Unfortunately inside a shopping mall, where GPS signal is hardly available, navigation becomes troublesome. In this paper, we propose an indoor navigation system to address the problem. Unlike most existing indoor navigation systems, which relies heavily on infrastructures and pre-labelled maps, our system uses only photos taken by cellphone cameras as input. We utilize multiple image processing techniques to parse photos of a mall's shopping instruction and a construct topological map of the mall. Moreover, we propose a new feature fusion method to help automatically identifying shops in a photo. During navigation, we make use of this method to find out the realtime position of the user.