Digital maps have become a part of our daily life with a number of commercial and free map services. These services have still a huge potential for enhancement with rich semantic information to support a large class of mapping applications. In this paper, we present Map++, a system that leverages standard cell-phone sensors in a crowdsensing approach to automatically enrich digital maps with different road semantics like tunnels, bumps, bridges, footbridges, crosswalks, road capacity, among others. Our analysis shows that cell-phones sensors with humans in vehicles or walking get affected by the different road features, which can be mined to extend the features of both free and commercial mapping services. We present the design and implementation of Map++ and evaluate it in a large city. Our evaluation shows that we can detect the different semantics accurately with at most 3 false positive rate and 6 false negative rate for both vehicle and pedestrian-based features. Moreover, we show that Map++ has a small energy footprint on the cell-phones, highlighting its promise as a ubiquitous digital maps enriching service.
For indoor maps, recently in @cite_21 @cite_16 @cite_25 authors proposed indoor maps construction and inferring indoor structures like elevators using sensors available on smart-phones. uses a similar approach for semantics inference. However, outdoor maps have completely different diverse semantics.
@cite_21 @cite_25 @cite_16
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Although GPS has been considered a ubiquitous outdoor localization technology, we are still far from a similar technology for indoor environments. While a number of technologies have been proposed for indoor localization, they are isolated efforts that are way from a true ubiquitous localization system. A ubiquitous indoor positioning system is envisioned to be deployed on a large scale worldwide, with minimum overhead, to work with heterogeneous devices, and to allow users to roam seamlessly from indoor to outdoor environments. Such a system will enable a wide set of applications including worldwide seamless direction finding between indoor locations, enhancing first responders' safety by providing anywhere localization and floor plans, and providing a richer environment for location-aware social networking applications. We describe an architecture for the ubiquitous indoor positioning system (IPS) and the challenges that have to be addressed to materialize it. We then focus on the feasibility of automating the construction of a worldwide indoor floor plan and fingerprint database which, as we believe, is one of the main challenges that limit the existence of a ubiquitous IPS system. Our proof of concept uses a crowd-sourcing approach that leverages the embedded sensors in today's cell phones as a worldwide distributed floor plan generation tool. This includes constructing the floor plans and determining the areas of interest (corridors, offices, meeting rooms, elevators, etc). The cloud computing concepts are also adopted for the processing and storage of the huge amount of data generated and requested by the system's users. Our results show the ability of the system to construct an accurate floor plan and identify the areas of interest with more than 90 accuracy. We also identify different research directions for addressing the challenges of realizing a true ubiquitous IPS system. The existence of a worldwide indoor floor-plans database can lead to significant growth in pervasive computing, especially for indoor environments. In this demonstration, we show CrowdInside: a crowdsourcing-based system for the automatic construction of buildings floor-plans. CrowdInside leverages the smart phones sensors that are ubiquitously available with humans who use a building to automatically and transparently construct accurate motion traces. CrowdInside processes the collected motion traces from different visitors of a building to detect its overall floor-plan shape as well as higher level semantics such as number of rooms, their shapes and locations, and corridors shapes along with a variety of points of interest in the environment. The goal of this demo is to show how the accurate motion traces are constructed as well as how the building floor-plan can be automatically generated. The existence of a worldwide indoor floorplans database can lead to significant growth in location-based applications, especially for indoor environments. In this paper, we present CrowdInside: a crowdsourcing-based system for the automatic construction of buildings floorplans. CrowdInside leverages the smart phones sensors that are ubiquitously available with humans who use a building to automatically and transparently construct accurate motion traces. These accurate traces are generated based on a novel technique for reducing the errors in the inertial motion traces by using the points of interest in the indoor environment, such as elevators and stairs, for error resetting. The collected traces are then processed to detect the overall floorplan shape as well as higher level semantics such as detecting rooms and corridors shapes along with a variety of points of interest in the environment. Implementation of the system in two testbeds, using different Android phones, shows that CrowdInside can detect the points of interest accurately with 0.2 false positive rate and 1.3 false negative rate. In addition, the proposed error resetting technique leads to more than 12 times enhancement in the median distance error compared to the state-of-the-art. Moreover, the detailed floorplan can be accurately estimated with a relatively small number of traces. This number is amortized over the number of users of the building. We also discuss possible extensions to CrowdInside for inferring even higher level semantics about the discovered floorplans.