The NTAV/SPA 2012 conference was held on 27–29th September 2012 and was organized by the Institute of Electronics, Lodz University of Technology (www.eletel.p.lodz.pl) with the support of the IEEE Polish Section Region 8, Polish Section of the Audio Engineering Society, Department of Acoustics, Wroclaw University of Technology and the Division of Signal Processing and Electronic Systems, Poznan University of Technology.
An electronic system and an algorithm for estimating pedestrian geographic location in urban terrain is reported in the paper. Different sources of kinematic and positioning data are acquired (i.e.: accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS receiver, raster maps of terrain) and jointly processed by a Monte-Carlo simulation algorithm based on the particle filtering scheme. These data are processed and fused to estimate the most probable geographical location of the user. A prototype system was designed, built and tested with a view to aiding blind pedestrians. It was shown in the conducted field trials that the method yields superior results to sole GPS readouts. Moreover, the estimated location of the user can be effectively sustained when GPS fixes are not available (e.g. tunnels).