"Every year, firefighters die or are seriously injured because they become lost, separated, or difficult to locate inside buildings or houses. Every day, law enforcement officers enter buildings, often alone, with their precise whereabouts unknown." - NIST Public Safety Communications Research Division (PSCR)

Seeing the value of increasing safety for responders and strengthening response procedures, the City of Memphis began a partnership with the University of Memphis to survey 1.86 million square feet of indoor space across seven facilities in October 2018. The work was funded from a grant received through the PSCR Award for PSIAP Point Cloud City. Not only does this work enable navigation of indoor space during emergencies, it facilitates other research efforts; localization/navigation, indoor location-based services, and augmented/virtual reality applications.

"Accurate, readily available, information-rich indoor maps and models are one of the keys to unlocking indoor localization, tracking, and navigation for first responders - both from an operational standpoint and to enable the R&D community to address specific public safety requirements in this field." - NIST Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program (PSIAP) - Point Cloud City


What's new?

  • September 2022: our book chapter published in the Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1612.
  • March 2021: our paper published in the SMARTGREENS 2021 conference.
  • Feb. 2021: our dataset is now available by request here.

Facilities:


Pink Palace Hickory Hill Community Center
Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library National Civil Rights Museum
Wilder Tower, UofM Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium
FedEx Institute of Technology, UofM

What are point clouds?

Point clouds are a collection of spatial 3D data points defined by a given coordinates system (typically x, y, z coordinates). A point cloud is made up of tiny data points in the three dimensional world to ultimately reflect a physical space. They are collected from a scanner, e.g. LiDAR in a 3D coordinate system, and used to create 3D models such as architecture or virtual reality applications.


Team:

City of Memphis:

  • Kimberly Bailey
  • Cynthia Halton
  • Wendy Harris
  • Joseph R. Roberts

University Of Memphis:

  • Mazharul Hossain
  • Eddie Jacobs
  • Tianxing Ma
  • Alfredo Ramirez
  • Lan Wang
  • Thomas Watson


Contact:

More data is needed to refine the indoor mapping model. To learn more about Map901 or get involved in indoor mapping, please contact:

Lan Wang, University of Memphis, lanwang@memphis.edu

[Download the Map901 Booklet]