# Indoor-Guided Navigation for People Who Are Blind: Crowdsourcing for Route Mapping and Assistance
## 3 Indoor Navigation: Towards a Crowdsourced Approach
### Crowdsourcing for Route Mapping  
Sequentially, in the second modality, the Web cloud server's navigational route information (stored in online DB) is used by people who are BSVI for indoor navigational purposes in chosen buildings (see Figure 5). Based on the user's preferences (faster, shorter, stair-free, most-used, best-rated, most recent, or other options), the machine learning software suggests the best route. The ETA system provides analyzed, semantically enriched, interpreted, and statistically validated indoor routes using information gathered in the first modality. In this way, people who are BSVI can use navigational instructions to (i) become acquainted with the chosen route and (ii) while orientating and navigating indoors. Machine learning and robot navigation approaches are innovatively adapted for this task. After the trip, BSVI users' feedback is used to evaluate, improve, and rate navigational route information in the web cloud DB. When a person who is BSVI receives navigational help from the ETA system, they can make additional comments and provide location IDs of landmarks. People who are BSVI can also rate the route. This user-centric feedback helps the ETA system to estimate the route and improve its validity. For this reason, ant colony or other SWARM optimization algorithms can be adapted. SWARM intelligence solves computational problems, which can be reduced to finding the right routing paths, where volunteers and people who are BSVI serve as SWARM agents who help the ETA system find the best routes. In the third modality, while using the ETA system for navigation, BSVI users can obtain online help in complex, out-of-the-ordinary indoor orientation situations, such as when they are lost or encounter unexpected obstacles. The ETA system can be used in real-time to obtain voice-guided help (through bone-conductive headphones) from a volunteer who is familiar with the particular route or building. It is important to note that, in this modality, mode#8 is active, while modes#1-7 (see Figure 4) can work in the background, optionally informing the BSVI user about the environment. Figure 4: Invocation of the ETA system’s modalities and modes. By using a smartphone's app and web-crowd-assisted interface, BSVI users can call registered volunteers who are familiar with that building and indoor route (see Figure 3). Volunteers can help the user to interpret the route, current position, obstacles, or other complex surrounding circumstances. They can do so using information sent from web cloud DB and the BSVI ETA system's cameras. In the latter case, the current camera view is provided to volunteers. However, as practice shows, that is often not enough for volunteers to make meaningful supporting decisions. They need to understand the contextual grand view of the building's interior passages. Therefore, in the proposed solution, volunteers can obtain additional information from the ETA system and online DB about the current or last confirmed position of the person who is BSVI on their route map. The ETA system can also provide the time, speed, and movement direction since  
Figure 5: Modality#1: Web-crowd-based mapping process of indoor navigational routes for people who are BSVI using the presented ETA system’s functionality. the last confirmed position to suggest where the person who is BSVI went astray and is currently located. Additionally, volunteers can obtain building floor schemes and other relevant information from third parties in the online DB. Equipped with this information, volunteers can be much more helpful to BSVI users in complex indoor navigational situations, especially if the ETA guiding system can select volunteers who are familiar with a particular building or route. Data input on indoor routes are processed in the web cloud server using a machine learning approach. Instructional information on guiding routes is collected in the web cloud database (DB).