Navigating through mega malls & large buildings made simple: Students from the Technion developed a novel mobile indoor navigational system

Winning project of the 2012 Amdocs Best Project Contest in collaboration with Qualcomm experts, this indoor navigation system helps you find your way within any large building using your “Smartphone”

Technion students from the Faculty of Computer Science developed a new indoor navigation approach, which enables you to locate your position and find your way around a large building with the help of your “Smartphone.” It was the winning project of the 2012 Amdocs Best Project Contest.

Students Alex Portnov and Dror Baum, supervised by Itai Dabran, Chief Engineer of Technion’s Laboratory of Computer Communication and Networking, and Constantine Elster from Qualcomm, built an indoor map screening and route finding system on a Smartphone that lets the user locate a store in a huge mall, find an office in a large office building, or get to a specific gate at an airport. The mobile system automatically sketches an efficient route to follow, to reach your destination point.

The application operates through multiple pathfinding stages:

1. With the assistance of a Smartphone’s camera, the user photographs a printed or hand-written floor plan, area or maze.
2. The phone sends the diagram to a server, which stores the picture together with additional parameters.
3. The user indicates with his/her finger both the starting and destination points, and the phone sends a request to the server. The server initiates graphic algorithms and displays on the screen a drawing of the shortest distance between the two points that are obstacle free.
4. The picture becomes stored in the server, and is given a QR Code so that it may be reused multiple times.

The algorithms are calculated very fast, and the map and route are drawn in under a minute.

“In effect, we built a framework for indoor map making and navigation, based on a building’s architectural plan,” explain Dror and Alex. “If a shopping mall’s floor plan will be featured in the form of a barcode at the entrance, shoppers will be able to scan it on their Smartphone and within seconds, get the shortest route to their desired store location.”

During the process, distractions such as colors are automatically eliminated from the scanned diagram, so that a clear navigational map can be achieved, upon which routes can be found and drawn.

Above: Dror (on the right) and Alex, with a poster describing their work. Photographed by: Itai Dovran, from the Technion