The Location Based Service is growing rapidly nowadays due to the universalization of the use for smartphone, therefore the location determination technology has been placed in an important position. This study suggests a method that can provide the estimate of users’ location by using PDR method and smartphone geomagnetic sensor data. This method assists the measure of enhancing the accuracy of indoor localization. Moreover, it is to study ways to provide the exact indoor layout for evacuating the workers in emergency such as fires and natural disasters.

This paper presents a localization system using ceiling images in a large indoor environment. For a system with low cost and complexity, we propose a single camera based system that utilizes ceiling images acquired from a camera installed to point upwards. For reliable operation, we propose a method using hybrid features which include natural landmarks in a natural scene and artificial landmarks observable in an infrared ray domain. Compared with previous works utilizing only infrared based features, our method reduces the required number of artificial features as we exploit both natural and artificial features. In addition, compared with previous works using only natural scene, our method has an advantage in the convergence speed and robustness as an observation of an artificial feature provides a crucial clue for robot pose estimation. In an experiment with challenging situations in a real environment, our method was performed impressively in terms of the robustness and accuracy. To our knowledge, our method is the first ceiling vision based localization method using features from both visible and infrared rays domains. Our system can be easily utilized with a variety of service robot applications in a large indoor environment.

Based on object recognition technology, we present a new global localization method for robot navigation. For doing this, we model any indoor environment using the following visual cues with a stereo camera; view-based image features for object recognition and those 3D positions for object pose estimation. Also, we use the depth information at the horizontal centerline in image where optical axis passes through, which is similar to the data of the 2D laser range finder. Therefore, we can build a hybrid local node for a topological map that is composed of an indoor environment metric map and an object location map. Based on such modeling, we suggest a coarse-to-fine strategy for estimating the global localization of a mobile robot. The coarse pose is obtained by means of object recognition and SVD based least-squares fitting, and then its refined pose is estimated with a particle filtering algorithm. With real experiments, we show that the proposed method can be an effective vision-based global localization algorithm.