If you see something, swipe towards it

Abstract

This paper presents iSee, a crowdsourced approach to detecting and localizing events in outdoor environments. Upon spotting an event, an iSee user only needs to swipe on her smartphone's touchscreen in the direction of the event. These swiping directions are often inaccurate and so are the compass measurements. Moreover, the swipes do not encode any notion of how far the event is located from the user, neither is the GPS location of the user accurate. Furthermore, multiple events may occur simultaneously and users do not explicitly indicate which events they are swiping towards. Nonetheless, as more users start contributing data, we show that our proposed system is able to quickly detect and estimate the locations of the events. We have implemented iSee on Android phones and have experimented in real-world settings by planting virtual "events" in our campus and asking volunteers to swipe on seeing one. Results show that iSee performs appreciably better than established triangulation and clusteringbased approaches, in terms of localization accuracy, detection coverage, and robustness to sensor noise.

A Mobile Crowdsensing Ecosystem Enabled by a Cloud-Based Publish/Subscribe Middleware

“…when a human involvement is crucial for the success of the service. For example, in [10] is presented an application which recognizes nearby events of interest. Human intervention is limited and required just to point a smartphone in the direction toward the event, and exact location is the extrapolated from sensor readings.…”