AccessVOR: A Semantically Enriched Voronoi-Based Approach for Navigation Assistance of Wheelchair Users in Indoor Environments

People with physical disabilities often face many challenges due to the non-compliance of public buildings to accessibility standards. Hence, it is necessary to provide them with relevant information about the quality of access associated with the environment they plan to visit. In this paper, we propose 'AccessVOR' (Accessibility assessment based on VORonoi Diagram), a novel approach that aims to automatically generate an indoor navigation network and to assess its accessibility for people moving with wheelchairs based on the American with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG). A semantically enriched spatial database is developed based on ADAAG and the Indoor Geography Markup Language (IndoorGML) standard. A Three-Dimensional (3D) navigation-graph is then generated from the various components of an indoor environment using a Voronoi Diagram. The semantics of ADAAG allow assessing the accessibility of each segment of this navigation graph. Next, a navigation cost is allocated to this graph based on the accessibility of each segment of the network graph for navigation purposes.