The Individual Discrimination Location Tracking Technology for Multimodal Interaction at the Exhibition

Abstract

After the internet era, we are moving to the ubiquitous society. Nowadays the people are interested in the multimodal interaction technology, which enables audience to naturally interact with the computing environment at the exhibitions such as gallery, museum, and park. Also, there are other attempts to provide additional service based on the location information of the audience, or to improve and deploy interaction between subjects and audience by analyzing the using pattern of the people. In order to provide multimodal interaction service to the audience at the exhibition, it is important to distinguish the individuals and trace their location and route. For the location tracking on the outside, GPS is widely used nowadays. GPS is able to get the real time location of the subjects moving fast, so this is one of the important technologies in the field requiring location tracking service. However, as GPS uses the location tracking method using satellites, the service cannot be used on the inside, because it cannot catch the satellite signal. For this reason, the studies about inside location tracking are going on using very short range communication service such as ZigBee, UWB, RFID, as well as using mobile communication network and wireless lan service. However these technologies have shortcomings in that the audience needs to use additional sensor device and it becomes difficult and expensive as the density of the target area gets higher. In addition, the usual exhibition environment has many obstacles for the network, which makes the performance of the system to fall. Above all these things, the biggest problem is that the interaction method using the devices based on the old technologies cannot provide natural service to the users. Plus the system uses sensor recognition method, so multiple users should equip the devices. Therefore, there is the limitation in the number of the users that can use the system simultaneously. In order to make up for these shortcomings, in this study we suggest a technology that gets the exact location information of the users through the location mapping technology using Wi-Fi and 3d camera of the smartphones. We applied the signal amplitude of access point using wireless lan, to develop inside location tracking system with lower price. AP is cheaper than other devices used in other tracking techniques, and by installing the software to the user's mobile device it can be directly used as the tracking system device. We used the Microsoft Kinect sensor for the 3D Camera. Kinect is equippedwith the function discriminating the depth and human information inside the shooting area. Therefore it is appropriate to extract user's body, vector, and acceleration information with low price. We confirm the location of the audience using the cell ID obtained from the Wi-Fi signal. By using smartphones as the basic device for the location service, we solve the problems of additional tagging device and provide environment that multiple users can get the interaction service simultaneously. 3d cameras located at each cell areas get the exact location and status information of the users. The 3d cameras are connected to the Camera Client, calculate the mapping information aligned to each cells, get the exact information of the users, and get the status and pattern information of the audience. The location mapping technique of Camera Client decreases the error rate that occurs on the inside location service, increases accuracy of individual discrimination in the area through the individual discrimination based on body information, and establishes the foundation of the multimodal interaction technology at the exhibition. Calculated data and information enables the users to get the appropriate interaction service through the main server.