Lately the interest in "support for pedestrians" has significantly grown. The i-mode cellular phone of NTT DoCoMo has also become of general interest. When a user gets map information by using the iappli-incompatible i-mode cellular phone, the map information generally is represented as GIF image data. The image data, however, is disadvantageous in respect to cost because users are charged according to the volume of data transmitted. So the authors developed an algorithm that generates a text symbol map, whose data volume is much smaller than that of an image map. Moreover they have developed the i-mode cellular phone-based pedestrian navigation system employing the text symbol map with enough information to guide users in spite of small data volume, and have confirmed the effectiveness of both.
Abstract