A Multi-Sensor System for Mobile Services with Vision Enhanced Object and Location Awareness

We describe a system which proposes a solution for multi-sensor object awareness and positioning to enable stable location awareness for a mobile service in urban areas. The system offers technology of outdoors vision based object recognition that will extend state-of-the-art location and context aware services towards object based awareness in urban environments. In the proposed application scenario, tourist pedestrians are equipped with a GPRS or UMTS capable camera-phone. They are interested whether their field of view contains tourist sights that would point to more detailed information. Multimedia type data about related history might be explored by a mobile user who is intending to learn within the urban environment. Ambient learning is in this way achieved by pointing the device towards the urban sight, capturing an image, and consequently getting information about the object on site and within the focus of attention, i.e., the user's current field of view. The described mobile system offers multiple opportunities for application in both mobile business and commerce, and is currently developed towards an industrial prototype