Matching buildings: Pose estimation in an urban environment

By use of a wearable geographical information system (wearable GIS) individual guided walks for tourists can be generated. Fraunhofer-IGD aims to develop a system accompanying a tourist while he visits a city. Whenever he desires information the system is supposed to offer information about the environment. This requires the determination of the location. Appropriate results are delivered by the global positioning system (GPS). However, they do not offer information about the line of sight of the tourist. Therefore, a video stream is used. It enables comparison with an underlying GIS. Association of the images with spatial data is necessary as the system is established in an urban environment which cannot be changed, for example by markers. As soon as the content of the image coincides with the information of the GIS the exact location of the tourist and the line of sight are determined. The following paper describes an approach matching information of a real image with generated images of a city model.