Indoor Localization for Visually Impaired Travelers Using Computer Vision on a Smartphone

Wayfnding is a major challenge for visually impaired travelers, who generally lack access to visual cues such as landmarks and informational signs that many travelers rely on for navigation. Indoor wayfnding is particularly challenging since the most commonly used source of location information for wayfnding, GPS, is inaccurate indoors. We describe a computer vision approach to indoor localization that runs as a real-time app on a conventional smartphone, which is intended to support a full-featured wayfnding app in the future that will include turn-by-turn directions. Our approach combines