A tool for crowdsourced building information modeling through low-cost range camera: preliminary demonstration and potential

Within the construction sector, Building Information Models (BIMs) are more and more used thanks to the several benefits that they offer in the design of new buildings and the management of the existing ones. Frequently, however, BIMs are not available for already built constructions, but, at the same time, the range camera technology provides nowadays a cheap, intuitive and effective tool for automatically collecting the 3D geometry of indoor environments. It is thus essential to find new strategies, able to perform the first step of the scan to BIM process, by extracting the geometrical information contained in the 3D models that are so easily collected through the range cameras. In this work, a new algorithm to extract planimetries from the 3D models of rooms acquired by means of a range camera is therefore presented. The algorithm was tested on two rooms, characterized by different shapes and dimensions, whose 3D models were captured with the Occipital Structure SensorTM. The preliminary results are promising: the developed algorithm is able to model effectively the 2D shape of the investigated rooms, with an accuracy level comprised in the range of 5 - 10 cm. It can be potentially used by non-expert users in the first step of the BIM generation, when the building geometry is reconstructed, for collecting crowdsourced indoor information in the frame of BIMs Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) generation

Crowdsourcing-Based Fingerprinting for Indoor Location in Multi-Storey Buildings

POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033479The number of available indoor location solutions has been growing, however with insufficient precision, high implementation costs or scalability limitations. As fingerprinting-based methods rely on ubiquitous information in buildings, the need for additional infrastructure is discarded. Still, the time-consuming manual process to acquire fingerprints limits their applicability in most scenarios. This paper proposes an algorithm for the automatic construction of environmental fingerprints on multi-storey buildings, leveraging the information sources available in each scenario. It relies on unlabelled crowdsourced data from users’ smartphones. With only the floor plans as input, a demand for most applications, we apply a multimodal approach that joins inertial data, local magnetic field andWi-Fi signals to construct highly accurate fingerprints. Precise movement estimation is achieved regardless of smartphone usage through Deep Neural Networks, and the transition between floors detected from barometric data. Users’ trajectories obtained with Pedestrian Dead Reckoning techniques are partitioned into clusters with Wi-Fi measurements. Straight sections from the same cluster are then compared with subsequence Dynamic Time Warping to search for similarities. From the identified overlapping sections, a particle filter fits each trajectory into the building’s floor plans. From all successfully mapped routes, fingerprints labelled with physical locations are finally obtained. Experimental results from an office and a university building show that this solution constructs comparable fingerprints to those acquired manually, thus providing a useful tool for fingerprinting-based solutions automatic setup.publishersversionpublishe

Survey on indoor map standards and formats

With the adoption of indoor positioning solutions, which enable for a variety of location-based spatial services, a number of indoor map standards and formats have been proposed in the last decade. As each of these indoor map standard has its own purpose, the strengths and weaknesses are necessary to be understood and analyzed before selecting one of them for a given application. The Indoor Map Subcommittee has been established under IPIN/ISC in 2017. Among others, the goal of this working group is to compare available indoor map standards, provide a guideline for their application and advise on changes to their standardization development organizations if necessary. In this paper we present a survey of indoor map standards as an achievement of the subcommittee. The scope of the survey covers official standards such as IFC of BuildingSmart, IndoorGML and CityGML of OGC, and Indoor OpenStreetMap. We present several use-cases to show and discuss how to build indoor maps.The work of K.-J. Li was supported by a grant (19NSIP-B135746-03) from National Spatial Information Research Program (NSIP) funded by MOLIT of Korean government. The work of C. Laoudias has been supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 739551 (KIOS CoE) and from the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development. Torres-Sospedra and Perez-Navarro want to thank the Spanish network of excellence, REPNIN+,TEC2017-90808-REDT. The work of A. Moreira has been supported by FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019

Iterative Design and Prototyping of Computer Vision Mediated Remote Sighted Assistance

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) is an emerging navigational aid for people with visual impairments (PVI). Using scenario-based design to illustrate our ideas, we developed a prototype showcasing potential applications for computer vision to support RSA interactions. We reviewed the prototype demonstrating real-world navigation scenarios with an RSA expert, and then iteratively refined the prototype based on feedback. We reviewed the refined prototype with 12 RSA professionals to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of the prototyped computer vision concepts. The RSA expert and professionals were engaged by, and reacted insightfully and constructively to the proposed design ideas. We discuss what we learned about key resources, goals, and challenges of the RSA prosthetic practice through our iterative prototype review, as well as implications for the design of RSA systems and the integration of computer vision technologies into RSA

“AccessBIM” - A Model of Environmental Characteristics for Vision Impaired Indoor Navigation and Way Finding

The complexity of modern indoor environments has made navigation difficult for individuals with vision impairment. Hence, this thesis presents the AccessBIM framework, which is an optimized database that’s facilitates generation of a real-time floor plan with path determination. The AccessBIM framework has the potential to play an integral role in improving the independence and quality of life for people with vision impairment whilst also decreasing the cost to the community related to caretakers

LocaRDS: A Localization Reference Data Set

The use of wireless signals for the purposes of localization enables a host of applications relating to the determination and verification of the positions of network participants ranging from radar to satellite navigation. Consequently, this has been a longstanding interest of theoretical and practical research in mobile networks and many solutions have been proposed in the scientific literature. However, it is hard to assess the performance of these in the real world and, more importantly, to compare their advantages and disadvantages in a controlled scientific manner. With this work, we attempt to improve the current state of art methodology in localization research and to place it on a solid scientific grounding for future investigations. Concretely, we developed LocaRDS, an open reference data set of real-world crowdsourced flight data featuring more than 222 million measurements from over 50 million transmissions recorded by 323 sensors. We demonstrate how we can verify the quality of LocaRDS measurements so that it can be used to test, analyze and directly compare different localization methods. Finally, we provide an example implementation for the aircraft localization problem and a discussion of possible metrics for use with LocaRDS