Urban environments like city centers are recognized as one of the most complex systems for modeling. Because of their high density of big buildings as well as their complicated processes, there is the strong need for planning and managing properly. Here, the heavy trend towards web-enabled systems can help to improve communication, organization and decision-making in favor. In the field of urba...

To Ludwig Streit on his 70 th birthday with warm wishes Abstract A complex web of roads, walkways and public transport systems can hide areas of geographical isolation very difficult to analyze. Random walks are used to spot the structural details of urban fabric.

During medical emergencies, the ability to communicate the state and position of injured individuals is essential. In critical situations or crowd aggregations, this may result difficult or even impossible due to the inaccuracy of verbal communication, the lack of precise localization for the medical events, and/or the failure/congestion of infrastructure-based communication networks. In such a...

In this paper we propose the use of specific mobile system architecture for navigation in urban environments. The aim of this work is to evaluate how virtual and augmented reality interfaces can provide location and orientation-based services using different technologies. The virtual reality interface is entirely based on sensors to detect the location and orientation of the user while the augm...

Satellite navigation signals demodulation performance is historically tested and compared in the Additive White Gaussian Noise propagation channel model which well simulates open areas. Nowadays, the majority of new applications targets dynamic users in urban environments; therefore the implementation of a simulation tool able to provide realistically GNSS signal demodulation performance in obs...

In this master thesis a method for image-based localisation given a 3D-model of an urban environment is presented. To construct the model photos are taken with a calibrated camera of a part of a street from different angles and distances. For the system, the photos are to be matched together in pairs of two, and several 3Dmodels are built of these pairs. These 3D-models are then concatenated, s...

An important difference exists between the way humans communicate route knowledge and the turn-by-turn route directions provided by the majority of current navigation services. Navigation services present route directions with the same amount of detail regardless the route segment’s significance in the instructions, user’s distance from the destination, and finally the level of user’s familiari...

This paper is an overview of the AVENUE project at Columbia University. AVENUE's main goal is to automate the site modeling process in urban environments. The rst component of AVENUE is a 3-D modeling system which constructs complete 3-D geometric models with photometric texture mapping acquired from di erent viewpoints. The second component is a planning system that plans the Next-BestView for...

We present new prototype tools for optimizing building solar energy impacts in urban regions, to enable better real-time control and policy decisions for energy supply and demand response. The concept is demonstrated with a prototype that estimates the amount of direct sunlight available to building surfaces in complex urban landscapes, taking into consideration local weather predictions (via c...

Situational awareness is crucial for autonomous driving in urban environments. We present the moving vehicle tracking module we developed for our autonomous driving robot Junior. The robot won second place in the Urban Grand Challenge, an autonomous driving race organized by the U.S. Government in 2007. The module provides reliable detection and tracking of moving vehicles from a high-speed mov...