LookUp is a novel shoe sensor based approach for sub-meter location classification in noisy outdoor urban environments. Pedestrians are most likely at risk when crossing the street. LookUp estimates pedestrian risk by sensing if a pedestrian is walking safely on the sidewalk or transitioned into the street. Unlike earlier approaches of dead reckoning and step counting, it can measure the inclination of the ground a person is walking on and detect roadway features such as ramps and curbs, that precisely indicate sidewalk-street transitions. These detections can be used to warn distracted pedestrians, or oncoming vehicles of the pedestrian's presence in-street. LookUp was exhaustively evaluated in the high-clutter Manhattan environment.
