Crosswalk-Guided Inertial Navigation for Visually Impaired Pedestrians

In inertial-only navigation systems, long-term position drift is inevitable without periodic resetting or anchoring. While numerous position improvement techniques have been proposed, the majority of the correction approaches rely on external data sources other than inertial measurements, introducing additional complexity and installation requirements. Furthermore, when attempting to anchor positions using pedestrian map information, it is often observed that pedestrians, including those who are visually impaired, often deviate from predefined walking paths, further complicating accurate positioning. To address these challenges, we introduce inertial-based correction technique for Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR), with the aim of keeping all the processing in the inertial domain. We couple a personalized PDR solution for visually impaired pedestrians with a crosswalk crossing information detected in the inertial data. The correction technique relies on generating parameterized trajectory proposals that match the temporal information from detected crosswalk crossings with known crosswalk locations on maps. We demonstrate that this method reduces the positioning error of the underlying PDR by 50% on real-world data collected from visually impaired individuals, while also meeting real-time processing constraints.