JustWalk: A Crowdsourcing Approach for the Automatic Construction of Indoor Floorplans

Navigation applications are now considered popular services for mobile phones users. However, despite the fact that people spend most of time indoors, these applications are still limited in indoor spaces due to the lack of large-scale indoor floorplan databases. We present JustWalk: a crowd intelligence-based system for the automatic construction of buildings floorplans. JustWalk employs a participatory sensing approach using smartphones that are ubiquitously available with users who visit a building to automatically construct accurate motion traces. These traces are then processed by means of different mathematical and image processing techniques to detect the overall floorplan shape and higher level semantics such as detecting rooms and corridors shapes along with a variety of points of interest in the environment. Compared to other approaches, JustWalk depends only on the users walking patterns and motion traces without requiring any obtrusive user actions. Experimental evaluation of JustWalk using android phones in three testbeds shows that it achieves high accuracy for the estimation of the detailed floorplan with a relatively small number of traces; highlighting its promise as a ubiquitous indoor mapping service.