Building Tomography: Crowdsourcing-based Automatic Indoor Floormap Construction

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Building Tomography: Crowdsourcing-based Automatic Indoor Floormap 
Construction"

by

Mr. Junliang Liu


ABSTRACT:

Building tomography is to explore indoor architectural layouts, usually 
represented as a floor plan, from outside. Floor plan illustrates a number of 
key spatial elements like rooms, corridors, walls, and other physical features 
at one level of a building. Floor plan plays an essential role in many indoor 
pervasive and mobile applications, but its collection and on-site calibration 
are inconvenient and usually prohibitively costly for map providers.

In this proposal, we aim at exploring the possibility of automatically 
generating floor plans. Our idea is based on human-centric sensing and 
crowdsourcing. The popularity of smartphones, with rich built-in sensors, 
enables fine-grained sensory records on human mobility and activity. Although 
the records from one user might be less useful, a large amount of contributing 
users enrich the records to an applicable level so that the interior layout of 
a building emerges. The main objective is to design and implement a building 
tomography system that is inexpensive and pervasive. No building knowledge is 
required and all sensor readings are collected by off-the-shelf smartphones.


Date:                   Wednesday, 23 January 2013

Time:                   2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3501
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:      Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Kai Chen (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lin Gu
 			Dr. Jogesh Muppala


**** ALL are Welcome ****