Pedestrian Inertial Navigation System Augmented by Vision-Based Foot-to-foot Relative Position Measurements

In this paper, we investigate how self-contained pedestrian navigation can be augmented by the use of foot-to-foot visual observations. The main contribution is a measurement model that uses Zero velocity UpdaTe (ZUPT) and relative position measurements between the two shoes obtained from shoe-mounted feature patterns and cameras. This measurement model provides directly the compensation measurements for the three position states and three velocity states of a pedestrian. The involved features for detection are independent of surrounding environments, thus, the proposed system has a constant computational complexity in any context. The performance of the proposed system was compared to a standalone ZUPT method and a relative-distance-aided ZUPT method. Simulation results showed an improvement in accumulated navigation errors by over 90%. Real-world experiments were conducted, exhibiting a maximum improvement of 85% in accumulated errors, verifying validity of the approach.