Natural markers for augmented reality-based indoor navigation and facility maintenance

• Natural markers support AR-based indoor navigation and facility maintenance.
• We evaluate the performance of natural markers for indoor navigation purposes.
• We verify the practical potential based on case studies on the university campus.

The longest phase in a facility's lifecycle is its maintenance period, during which operators perform activities to provide a comfortable living and working environment as well as to upkeep equipment to prevent functional failures. In current practice operators need a considerable amount of time to manually process dispersed and unformatted facility information to perform an actual task. Existing research approaches rely on expensive hardware infrastructure or use artificial, thus unesthetic Augmented Reality (AR) markers. In this paper we present a natural marker based AR framework that can digitally support facility maintenance (FM) operators when navigating to the FM item of interest and when actually performing the maintenance and repair actions. Marker detection performance experiments and case studies on our university campus indicate the feasibility and potential of natural markers for AR-based maintenance support.