Locate, Tell, and Guide: Enabling Public Cameras to Navigate the Public

Abstract

Indoor navigation is essential to a wide spectrum of applications in the era of mobile computing. Existing vision-based technologies suffer from both start-up costs and the absence of semantic information for navigation. We observe an opportunity to leverage pervasively deployed surveillance cameras to deal with the above drawbacks and revisit the problem of indoor navigation with a fresh perspective. In this paper, we propose <i>iSAT</i> , a system that enables public surveillance cameras, as indoor navigating satellites, to locate users on the floorplan, tell users with semantic information about the surrounding environment, and guide users with navigation instructions. However, enabling public cameras to navigate is non-trivial due to 3 factors: absence of real scale, disparity of camera perspective, and lack of semantic information. To overcome these challenges, <i>iSAT</i> leverages POI-assisted framework and adopts a novel coordinate transformation algorithm to associate public and mobile cameras, and further attaches semantic information to user location. Extensive experiments in 4 different scenarios show that <i>iSAT</i> achieves a localization accuracy of 0.48m and a navigation success rate of 90.5 percent, outperforming the state-of-th-art systems by <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&gt; 30\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> . Benefiting from our solution, all areas with public cameras can upgrade to smart spaces with visual navigation services.