MARA

Mobile Augmented Reality Application (MARA) for Emergency Response and Building Evacuation

Current Students: Alwin Prabu, Rishitha Reddy Pesaladinne

Past Students: Praneeth Koppolu, Nishith Mannuru

Status: Current

UNT Markers: First Floor Plan, Second Floor Plan

There are a wide variety of mobile phone emergency response applications exist for both indoor and outdoor environments. However, outdoor applications mostly provide accident and navigation information to users, and indoor applications are limited to the unavailability of GPS positioning and WiFi access problems. This work describes the proposed mobile augmented reality application (MARA) that allows both outdoor and indoor users to retrieve and manage information for emergency response and navigation that is spatially registered with the real world. The proposed MARA utilizes feature extraction for location sensing in indoor environments as during emergencies GPS and WiFi systems might not work. The MARA delivers critical evacuation information to smartphone users in the indoor environment and navigation information in the outdoor environments.

MARA is designed specifically for acquiring spatial analysis, situational awareness, and visual communication. The mobile AR application uses existing permanent features such as room numbers and signage in the building as markers to display the floor plan of the building and show navigational directions to the exit. Through the visualization of integrated geographic information systems and real-time data analysis, our mobile AR application provides the current location of the person, the number of exits, and user-specific personalized evacuation routes. The Mobile AR application provides information to support effective decision-making during emergencies for both building occupants and emergency responders.

Publications

1. Sharma, S., Pesaladinne R., "Spatial Analysis and Visual Communication of Emergency Information through Augmented Reality"  in Journal of Imaging Science and Technology,  https://doi.org/10.2352/J.ImagingSci.Technol.2023.67.6.060401, pp 1 - 9,  2023.
2. Pesaladinne, R., Chellatore, M.P.,Dronavalli,S., Sharma, S., "Situational awareness and feature extraction for indoor building navigation using mixed reality", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, (IEEE-CSCI), Research Track on Big Data and Data Science (CSCI-RTBD), Las Vegas, USA, December 13-15, 2023.
3. Sharma, S, "Mobile Augmented Reality System for Emergency Response", Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Management and Applications (SERA 2023), Orlando, USA, May 23-25, 2023.
4. Sharma, S., Engel, D., "Mobile augmented reality system for object detection, alert, and safety", Proceedings of the IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI 2023) in the Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality Conference, January 15-19, 2023.
5. Mannuru, N. R., Kanumuru, M., and Sharma, S., "Mobile AR application for navigation and emergency response", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence , (IEEE-CSCI-RTMC), Las Vegas, USA, December 14-16, 2022.
6. Sharma, S, Bodempudi, S.T., Scribner, D., Grynovicki, J., Grazaitis, P., "Emergency response using HoloLens for building evacuation", Proceeding of 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21607-8_23 , Online ISBN 978-3-030-21607-8, Orlando, Florida, USA, 26-31 July, HCII 2019, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11574, pp. 299-311, 2019.
7. Stigall, J., Bodempudi, S.T., Sharma, S, Scribner, D., Grynovicki, J., Grazaitis, P., "Use of Microsoft HoloLens in indoor evacuation", International Journal of Computers and their Applications, IJCA, Vol. 26, No. 1, March 2019.
8. Stigall, J., Sharma, S, "Evaluation of Mobile Augmented Reality Application for Building Evacuation", Proceedings of 28th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE 2019) in San Diego, CA, USA on September 30 - October 2, 2019.
9. Stigall, J., Bodempudi, S.T., Sharma, S, Scribner, D., Grynovicki, J., Grazaitis, P., "Building Evacuation using Microsoft HoloLens", Proceedings of 27th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE 2018), New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, pp. 20-25, October 8-10, 2018. [Best paper award finalist]
10. James Stigall and Dr. Sharad Sharma, "Mobile augmented reality application for building evacuation" , Poster Presentation, 11th Annual Grant Expo and Research day, Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP), Bowie State University, April 10, 2018. [Won first Prize]
11. Stigall, J., Sharma, S, "Mobile Augmented Reality Application for Building Evacuation Using Intelligent Signs", proceedings of ISCA 26th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE-2017), pp. 19-24, San Diego,CA, USA, October 2-4, 2017.
12. Sharma, S, Jerripothula, S., "An indoor augmented reality mobile application for simulation of building evacuation", proceedings of SPIE conference on the Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2015, paper 9392-7, San Francisco, CA, USA, 9 - 10 February 2015.

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