Point-Graph Neural Network Based Novel Visual Positioning System for Indoor Navigation

Abstract

Indoor localization is a basic element in location-based services (LBSs), including seamless indoor and outdoor navigation, location-based precision marketing, spatial recognition in robotics, augmented reality, and mixed reality. The popularity of LBSs in the augmented reality and mixed reality fields has increased the demand for a stable and efficient indoor positioning method. However, the problem of indoor visual localization has not been appropriately addressed, owing to the strict trade-off between accuracy and cost. Therefore, we use point cloud and RGB characteristic information for the accurate acquisition of three-dimensional indoor space. The proposed method is a novel visual positioning system (VPS) capable of determining the user’s position by matching the pose information of the object estimated by the improved point-graph neural network (GNN) with the pose information label of a voxel database object addressed in predefined voxel units. We evaluated the performance of the proposed system considering a stationary object in indoor space. The results verify that high positioning accuracy and direction estimation can be efficiently achieved. Thus, spatial information of indoor space estimated using the proposed novel VPS can aid in indoor navigation.

Keywords

• indoor navigation
• visual positioning system
• graph neural network
• point cloud
• three-dimensional object pose estimation
• voxel