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.
We present Dejavu, a system that uses standard cell-phone sensors to provide accurate and energy-efficient outdoor localization suitable for car navigation. Our analysis shows that different road landmarks have a unique signature on cell-phone sensors; For example, going inside tunnels, moving over bumps, going up a bridge, and even potholes all affect the inertial sensors on the phone in a unique pattern. Dejavu employs a dead-reckoning localization approach and leverages these road landmarks, among other automatically discovered abundant virtual landmarks, to reset the accumulated error and achieve accurate localization. To maintain a low energy profile, Dejavu uses only energy-efficient sensors or sensors that are already running for other purposes. We present the design of Dejavu and how it leverages crowd-sourcing to automatically learn virtual landmarks and their locations. Our evaluation results from implementation on different android devices in both city and highway driving show that Dejavu can localize cell phones to within 8.4 m median error in city roads and 16.6 m on highways. Moreover, compared to GPS and other state-of-the-art systems, Dejavu can extend the battery lifetime by 347 , achieving even better localization results than GPS in the more challenging in-city driving conditions.