Inside Knowledge: Graph-based Path Generation with Explainable Data Augmentation and Curriculum Learning for Visual Indoor Navigation

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel graph-based, vision-only indoor navigation method that is efficient, explainable, and easy to deploy, utilizing a new large-scale dataset and curriculum learning to improve robustness and automatic data annotation.

Contribution

It introduces a new graph-based path generation approach with explainable data augmentation and curriculum learning, along with a large-scale indoor navigation dataset and an Android application.

Findings

Achieved real-time, vision-only indoor navigation without additional sensors or scene maps.

Developed a large-scale dataset with annotated directions in a shopping mall environment.

Demonstrated robustness and efficiency of the proposed method in practical scenarios.

Abstract

Indoor navigation is a difficult task, as it generally comes with poor GPS access, forcing solutions to rely on other sources of information. While significant progress continues to be made in this area, deployment to production applications is still lacking, given the complexity and additional requirements of current solutions. Here, we introduce an efficient, real-time and easily deployable deep learning approach, based on visual input only, that can predict the direction towards a target from images captured by a mobile device. Our technical approach, based on a novel graph-based path generation method, combined with explainable data augmentation and curriculum learning, includes contributions that make the process of data collection, annotation and training, as automatic as possible, efficient and robust. On the practical side, we introduce a novel largescale dataset, with video footage inside a relatively large shopping mall, in which each frame is annotated with the correct next direction towards different specific target destinations. Different from current methods, ours relies solely on vision, avoiding the need of special sensors, additional markers placed along the path, knowledge of the scene map or internet access. We also created an easy to use application for Android, which we plan to make publicly available. We make all our data and code available along with visual demos on our project site