  Situational awareness and Indoor location tracking for firefighters is one of
the tasks with paramount importance in search and rescue operations. For Indoor
Positioning systems (IPS), GPS is not the best possible solution. There are few
other techniques like dead reckoning, Wifi and bluetooth based triangulation,
Structure from Motion (SFM) based scene reconstruction for Indoor positioning
system. However due to high temperatures, the rapidly changing environment of
fires, and low parallax in the thermal images, these techniques are not
suitable for relaying the necessary information in a fire fighting environment
needed to increase situational awareness in real time. In fire fighting
environments, thermal imaging cameras are used due to smoke and low visibility
hence obtaining relative orientation from the vanishing point estimation is
very difficult. The following technique that is the content of this research
implements a novel optical flow based video compass for orientation estimation
and fused IMU data based activity recognition for IPS. This technique helps
first responders to go into unprepared, unknown environments and still maintain
situational awareness like the orientation and, position of the victim fire
fighters.
