An instance-based scoring system for indoor landmark salience evaluation

Abstract

Navigation in a complex indoor environment can be difficult, and pedestrians may find themselves disoriented. As the featured objects of an environment, indoor landmarks play an important role in navigation. A review of the existing literature in outdoor landmark evaluation methods, however, shows that they cannot be fully applicable in any indoor environment. In this paper, an instance-based scoring system is proposed for analyzing the indicators that influence the salience of spatial objects from visual, semantic and structural aspects. An Analytic Hierarchy Process was applied to calculate landmark weights using these indicators. Two types of indoor scenes were employed as instances to verify the validity of this method, the Dongchenghui shopping mall (Nanjing, China) using a subjective questionnaire and interview method, and the headquarters of Masaryk University (Brno, Czechia) using an objective eyetracking method. Be result of the two instances showed that the proposed method was feasible.

Research on Generating an Indoor Landmark Salience Model for Self-Location and Spatial Orientation from Eye-Tracking Data

“…Richter and Winter [17] defined the formal model for landmark salience, which includes four measures of visual attractiveness: the façade area, shape, color, and visibility. Zhu [19] proposed the façade area, the board size and design features to calculate the salience of indoor landmarks. However, there is no consensus regarding the salience attractiveness classification of geographic objects.…”

“…Thus, the indoor landmark salience models have been researched in recent years. Researchers [14,19] have proposed indoor landmark salience models based on visual, semantic and structural attractiveness, which is similar to the formal outdoor salience model. However, these attractiveness parameters (visual, semantic and structural) in the outdoor salience model cannot be directly applied to the indoor salience model.…”

“…Nuhn [8] proposed a salience model that weights results using expert knowledge based on formal research. Zhu [19] constructed an instance-based scoring system to evaluate indoor landmark salience. Thus, the PLSR, equal weighting, expert knowledge and instance-based scoring methods were selected to compare the accuracy of landmark salience evaluation methods.…”

“…As for the expert knowledge method, seven researchers with a PhD in cartography were invited to weight the importance of indoor landmark salience, and the results are shown in Table 11. Regarding the instance-based scoring method, the landmark salience attractiveness and weighting results are adapted from Zhu [19]. The landmark salience measured by the three algorithms was compared with the landmark salience based on eye-tracking data in Section 4.2.2.…”

On the Right Track: Comfort and Confusion in Indoor Environments

“…Because landmark-based wayfinding is known to be effective, landmarks should be included in route instructions [55,56]. Current studies focus mainly on the saliency of landmarks (e.g., [56][57][58][59]).…”