Finding a Parked Car Location in a Multi-Storey Building without GPS Service

Abstract

This paper introduces a new approach named ‘Find My Parked Car’ to provide the user with the return way for his parked car location in the indoor garage of a multi-storey building where GPS is denied using the acquisition data obtained from the inertial sensors on smart devices such as smartphones. We build up a system that employs Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning Technique (PDR) to track the user inside the building. This approach harness the environment landmarks for floors separation and the PDR paths’ landmarks to enhance them by applying the Kalman Filter. Then we prunes the paths to remove the redundant parts of paths. Finally, we display the paths that guide the user back to his car via an android application. The feature of our approach is to help users returning back to parked car location based only on the available ubiquitous sensors in the new smartphones without any need to have any map or any additional infrastructure support.