Visibility Vol 8 Issue 4, 2014

Indoor navigation is very difficult for people with visual impairments. Numerous technologies have been proposed for non-visually identifying the location and orientation of a pedestrian, but none has yet proven as successful as GPS for outdoor navigation. Smartphone apps have been developed in which visually impaired users send a camera snapshot of an object to a remote service for object identification. We asked whether a similar system could be used for indoor location sensing. An experiment was conducted to determine whether a normally sighted person, called the “interpreter”, could identify the location and facing direction of a photo taken by a simulated pedestrian in a building using a floor plan and a small number of representative photos from key locations within the floor plan.