PhotoMap: using spontaneously taken images of public maps for pedestrian navigation tasks on mobile devices

  • Authors:

  • Johannes Schöning;Antonio Krüger;Keith Cheverst;Michael Rohs;Markus Löchtefeld;Faisal Taher

  • Affiliations:

  • German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany;German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany;Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK;Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany;University of Münster, Münster, Germany;Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In many mid- to large-sized cities public maps are ubiquitous. One can also find a great number of maps in parks or near hiking trails. Public maps help to facilitate orientation and provide special information to not only tourists but also to locals who just want to look up an unfamiliar place while on the go. These maps offer many advantages compared to mobile maps from services like Google Maps Mobile or Nokia Maps. They often show local landmarks and sights that are not shown on standard digital maps. Often these 'You are here' (YAH) maps are adapted to a special use case, e.g. a zoo map or a hiking map of a certain area. Being designed for a fashioned purpose these maps are often aesthetically well designed and their usage is therefore more pleasant. In this paper we present a novel technique and application called PhotoMap that uses images of 'You are here' maps taken with a GPS-enhanced mobile camera phone as background maps for on-the-fly navigation tasks. We discuss different implementations of the main challenge, namely helping the user to properly georeference the taken image with sufficient accuracy to support pedestrian navigation tasks. We present a study that discusses the suitability of various public maps for this task and we evaluate if these georeferenced photos can be used for navigation on GPS-enabled devices.