Figure 1: Localisation Example: Correction of Incorrect
Sensor Data by including Information about Indoor Envi-
ronment. The Blue and Grey Dots Indicate Sensor Measure-
ments Whereas Grey Dots Correspond to Invalid Positions,
E. G. within a Wall, That Can Be Adjusted to a Correct Po-
sition Indicated by Green.
The occurrence probability of a specific object within
a building can be modelled by means of so-called
occupancy grid maps (OGMs), which represent the
occupancy probability of an object on the floor plan
of a building. The OGM is modelled by a cell ma-
trix whereas each cell is a square area of the indoor
environment holding the probability of being occu-
pied. Hence, generating OGMs requires floor plans
and consequently indoor data of buildings. Since in-
door data about building had either been generally not
available or is only provided in form of Computer
Aided Design (CAD) formats, an alternative data
source was created by the OpenStreetMap (OSM)
community: indoor map data has been collected by
volunteers and now provides detailed crowd-sourced
information about the structure of buildings. These
mapping activities have been being increased in re-
cent years and have led to a wider availability of in-
door data. An overview of mapped data is listed in the
OSM Wiki (OSM-Community, 2020).
To date, little attention has been paid to the in-
volvement of OSM indoor data in OGM generation.
This paper therefore examines OSM indoor map data
as a data source for the generation of OGMs and in-
troduces a procedure to create such OGMs as an input
for indoor positioning algorithms.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2
presents state-of-the-art methods for OGM generation
and outlines the research gap. Thereupon, Section 3
introduces the proposed procedure to generate OGMs
from OSM indoor data by illustrating the system con-
cept overview and subsequently describing the real-
isation of the single system modules. The obtained
results are presented and discussed in Section 4. Fi-
nally, Section 5 concludes the paper and gives an out-
look on future work.
2 RELATED WORK
Occupancy grid mapping was initially introduced
by Moravec and Elfes in 1985 (Moravec and Elfes,
1985). Originally, this mapping procedure was de-
veloped for noisy sonars and called “mapping with
known poses”. In literature, especially in the field
of probabilistic robotics, occupancy grid mapping is
often referred to as the process of generating maps
from noisy and uncertain sensor data while the po-
sition of the robot with the attached sensors such as
cameras, laser range scanners and LIDAR is known
(Matthies and Elfes, 1988), (Konolige, 1997), (Thrun,
2001). In this mapping problem, the aim is to build an
occupancy map of the environment, in which the oc-
currence of obstacles is stored.
For positioning/localisation, the opposite prob-
lem has to be solved: Based on an existing map, the
position of objects shall be derived, also in the pres-
ence of noisy sensor data. In our case, the existing
map is an OSM indoor map that has to be transformed
in an occupancy grid map first. In this context, OGM
generation is the transform of a floor plan into in-
dependent discrete cells. Each cell stores a variable
estimating the grade of its occupancy. The variable
can either be binary or continuous, stating whether the
cell is occupied or not or indicating the grade of oc-
cupancy, i. e. the occupancy probability of the object
to be localised.
Extant literature gives insight on how OSM maps
are transferred to OGMs and thereafter used for local-
isation purposes.
In their publications, Kurdej et al. present a local-
isation system for intelligent vehicles that uses OSM
outdoor map data as a-priori information (Kurdej,
2015), (Kurdej et al., 2012). This systems generates
OGMs based on OSM road and building information
and matches sensor data from optical sensors against
these OGMs.
Herrera et al. are the first to generate OGMs from
OSM indoor maps (Herrera et al., 2013), (Herrera
et al., 2014). Their algorithm derives the OGMs from
a manually defined graph network that overlays the
indoor map data. This graph consists of nodes, which
were defined by empirical studies and denote proba-
ble indoor positions. However, these nodes have to be
manually added to the graph.
Naik et al. proposed OSM-based indoor data for
robot navigation and generated a primitive OGM
for that purpose (Naik et al., 2019). This genera-
tion methodology involves only a limited set of ob-
jects, namely information about rooms and corridors.
Moreover, the OGM distinguishes between only two
occupancy states.
Occupancy Grid Map Generation from OSM Indoor Data for Indoor Positioning Applications
169