Towards a Semantic Spatial Model for Pedestrian Indoor Navigation

This paper presents a graph-based spatial model which can serve as a reference for guiding pedestrians inside buildings. We describe a systematic approach to construct the model from geometric data. In excess of the well-known topological relations, the model accounts for two important aspects of pedestrian navigation: firstly, visibility within spatial areas and, secondly, generating route descriptions. An algorithm is proposed which partitions spatial regions according to visibility criteria. It can handle simple polygons as encountered in floor plans. The model is structured hierarchically - each of its elements corresponds to a certain domain concept (‘room’, ‘door’, ‘floor’ etc.) and can be annotated with meta information. This is useful for applications in which such information have to be evaluated.