Mobile Navigation and Augmentation utilizing Real-World Text

Mobile, smart devices are already available in everyday life. Most of them offer a rich feature set, including camera, GPS antenna, or even WIFI modules. Navigation software utilizing GPS to acquire location data became very popular on these mobile clients. However, due to hardware restrictions GPS positioning cannot be used for indoor scenarios. In contrast, this paper is focused on navigation for indoor environments targeting on a low-cost solution, without the requirement of additional hardware installations or markers inside buildings. A server-based optical character recognition service is used to map images containing unique text passages – acquired with a mobile client – to additional meta data, e.g. locations or orientation. We also very briefly discuss that augmented-reality methods can be used to provide an intuitive presentation and interaction system by overlying real-world images with additional information like navigation symbols or internet hyperlinks.