KEYWORDS

Indoor localization, indoor navigation, GPS

1 INTRODUCTION
People spend most of their time in indoor facilities, such as malls, companies, universitiesetc., and most of them
are not completely familiar with these facilities structure and locations, as a result, they end up wasting their time
searching for their destination, correspondingly deploying an indoor navigation system will be beneficial for such
situations, but designing an efficient indoor system implies different challenges [2], such as map formulation,
location accuracy, indoor navigation, and mobile software to handle these services, in this paper we will highlight
the different approaches that are suggested by three research papers.

2 APPROACHES FOR INDOOR LOCALIZATION AND NAVIGATION

One of the recently introduced approaches is indoor navigation using augmented reality [1], it suggest the use of a
camera for navigating instead of using a regular map, for keeping accurate track of user indoor location, this system
assumes that a map with points has been created for the desired location, it consists of two main parts, at first it
requires the user to provide the initial location and destination, then it will start calculating the shortest path, while
giving directions using the smartphone camera, this system make use of mobile device accelerometer and
magnetometer to update the current location and number of steps regularly, in the form of three axes (x, y, and z)
while the z-axis indicates the forward movement of the user, then it starts to measure the step length using specific
formulas, after that the system will start calculating the angle and the distance between the current point and the
point ahead and compare the estimations with the actual observation of user movement, finally the shortest path will
be calculated by applying Dijkstra method using the points on the location map. Fig. 1 shows the user interface
while the user navigates using the camera; the green arrow indicates the next turn.

Another approach [2], which use very similar algorithms with additional improvements and functionalities, while
the first approach [1] does not involve any guidelines or implementation to create or generate a map, this approach
introduced a new web-based service that is capable of generating a map based on 360 panoramic images of the
indoor environment [2], it requires the user to capture images for each pathway and intersection then upload these
images to their web service the Map-Maker, after that the system will generate a map as a number of points and
the user will be able to assign a description to each point as seen in Fig. 2.The images need to be uploaded once and
the system will maintain the map for future potential users.

After generating the map, the system now is capable of navigating users to their destination point, like the previous
approach [1], this one also make use of mobile phone sensors to keep track of user steps and orientation, by
observing user movements on the (x, y, and z) axis, after that The Dead-reckoning Algorithm [2], will be used that
when a user takes a step the algorithm will start predicting next steps by observing all the points that can be reached
from his/her location on the map, while keeping track of the turns angles that the user did while navigating in order
to determine the shortest and lightest weight path.

From my point of view, both systems are using easily available resources that can be found in almost all
smartphones, staying away from relying on external resources such as WIFI access points which involves some
overhead, on the other hand the second system [2], provide a reliable and relatively easy way to generate a map for
any indoor facility.

3 IMPROVE INDOOR LOCATION ACCURACY USING QR CODES

The biggest concern in indoor navigation systems is user location accuracy, because pedestrian dead reckoning
algorithm and similar algorithms can get inefficient in particular situations, as a result, there is no obvious way to
get the exact location, one of the systems [3] suggests the use of QR codes along with mobile device sensors to get
an accurate reading of user location.

As the case in the two previous systems [1-2], the QR approach [3], also use the same algorithms and resources in
order to navigate (accelerometer, gyroscope, and camera), in addition to the use of WIFI access points locations for
WIFI finger-print matching, but in fact the core improvement in this system is the deployment of QR codes that
represents an actual landmarks in the indoor facility, that is distributed around the most important intersections,
pathways and initial entrance points inside the place, each QR point must contain basic information about its
location and coordinates and must be printed with a high-resolution image to make the identification process
convenient and fast, the user will start navigating using the traditional WIFI finger printing and dead reckoning then
whenever he/she pass by a QR code it can be scanned to get location accurately as seen in Fig. 3, and Fig. 4, which
shows the improvement in the navigation routes using a system with QR over a regular system .

In my opinion, applying such a system will contribute to indoor localization systems in multiple aspects, for
instance, it will be able to solve the problem of initial user location by providing QR points on each entrance spot, in
addition, it will be able to deal with the problem of vague location estimation which will save users time and
computational power.