'Turn Left after the WC, and Use the Lift to Go to theud2nd Floor' - Generation of Landmark-Based RouteudInstructions for Indoor Navigation

摘要

People in unfamiliar environments often need navigation guidance to reach a destination.udResearch has found that compared to outdoors, people tend to lose orientation much more easilyudwithin complex buildings, such as university buildings and hospitals. This paper proposesuda category-based method to generate landmark-based route instructions to support people'sudwayfinding activities in unfamiliar indoor environments. Compared to other methods relyingudon detailed instance-level data about the visual, semantic, and structural characteristics of individualudspatial objects, the proposed method relies on commonly available data about categories of spatialudobjects, which exist in most indoor spatial databases. With this, instructions like "Turn right after theudsecond door, and use the elevator to go to the second floor" can be generated for indoor navigation. A caseudstudy with a university campus shows that the method is feasible in generating landmark-basedudroute instructions for indoor navigation. More importantly, compared to metric-based instructionsud(i.e., the benchmark for indoor navigation), the generated landmark-based instructions can help usersudto unambiguously identify the correct decision point where a change of direction is needed, as welludas offer information for the users to confirm that they are on the right way to the destination.