Performance analysis of visualmarkers for indoor navigation systems

Abstract

The massive diffusion of smartphones, the growing interest in wearable devices and the Internet of Things, and the exponential rise of location based services (LBSs) have made the problem of localization and navigation inside buildings one of the most important technological challenges of recent years. Indoor positioning systems have a huge market in the retail sector and contextual advertising; in addition, they can be fundamental to increasing the quality of life for citizens if deployed inside public buildings such as hospitals, airports, and museums. Sometimes, in emergency situations, they can make the difference between life and death. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature. Recently, thanks to the high performance of smartphones’ cameras, marker-less and marker-based computer vision approaches have been investigated. In a previous paper, we proposed a technique for indoor localization and navigation using both Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and a 2D visual marker system deployed into the floor. In this paper, we presented a qualitative performance evaluation of three 2D visual markers, Vuforia, ArUco marker, and AprilTag, which are suitable for real-time applications. Our analysis focused on specific case study of visual markers placed onto the tiles, to improve the efficiency of our indoor localization and navigation approach by choosing the best visual marker system.