Methods and Applications of Space Understanding in Indoor Environment—A Decade Survey

Abstract

The demand for digitizing manufacturing and controlling processes has been steadily increasing in recent years. Digitization relies on different techniques and equipment, which produces various data types and further influences the process of space understanding and area recognition. This paper provides an updated view of these data structures and high-level categories of techniques and methods leading to indoor environment segmentation and the discovery of its semantic meaning. To achieve this, we followed the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology and covered a wide range of solutions, from floor plan understanding through 3D model reconstruction and scene recognition to indoor navigation. Based on the obtained SLR results, we identified three different taxonomies (the taxonomy of underlying data type, of performed analysis process, and of accomplished task), which constitute different perspectives we can adopt to study the existing works in the field of space understanding. Our investigations clearly show that the progress of works in this field is accelerating, leading to more sophisticated techniques that rely on multidimensional structures and complex representations, while the processing itself has become focused on artificial intelligence-based methods.