Fusion of Building Information and Range Imaging for Autonomous Location Estimation in Indoor Environments

Author： Kohoutek Tobias K. Mautz Rainer Wegner Jan D.

Publisher： MDPI

E-ISSN： 1424-8220|13|2|2430-2446

ISSN： 1424-8220

Source： Sensors, Vol.13, Iss.2, 2013-02, pp. : 2430-2446

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Abstract

We present a novel approach for autonomous location estimation and navigation in indoor environments using range images and prior scene knowledge from a GIS database (CityGML). What makes this task challenging is the arbitrary relative spatial relation between GIS and Time-of-Flight (ToF) range camera further complicated by a markerless configuration. We propose to estimate the camera's pose solely based on matching of GIS objects and their detected location in image sequences. We develop a coarse-to-fine matching strategy that is able to match point clouds without any initial parameters. Experiments with a state-of-the-art ToF point cloud show that our proposed method delivers an absolute camera position with decimeter accuracy, which is sufficient for many real-world applications (e.g., collision avoidance).