GPU-accelerated Hierarchical Panoramic Image Feature Retrieval for Indoor Localization

Indoor localization has many applications, such as commercial Location Based Services (LBS), robotic navigation, and assistive navigation for the blind. This paper formulates the indoor localization problem into a multimedia retrieving problem by modeling visual landmarks with a panoramic image feature, and calculating a user's location via GPU- accelerated parallel retrieving algorithm. To solve the scene similarity problem, we apply a multi-images based retrieval strategy and a 2D aggregation method to estimate the final retrieval location. Experiments on a campus building real data demonstrate real-time responses (14fps) and robust localization.