scholarly journals Accurate and Robust Floor Positioning in Complex Indoor Environments

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 2698
Author(s):  
Jingyu Huang ◽  
Haiyong Luo ◽  
Wenhua Shao ◽  
Fang Zhao ◽  
Shuo Yan

With the widespread development of location-based services, the demand for accurate indoor positioning is getting more and more urgent. Floor positioning, as a prerequisite for indoor positioning in multi-story buildings, is particularly important. Though lots of work has been done on floor positioning, the existing studies on floor positioning in complex multi-story buildings with large hollow areas through multiple floors still cannot meet the application requirements because of low accuracy and robustness. To obtain accurate and robust floor estimation in complex multi-story buildings, we propose a novel floor positioning method, which combines the Wi-Fi based floor positioning (BWFP), the barometric pressure-based floor positioning (BPFP) with HMM and the XGBoost based user motion detection. Extensive experiments show that using our proposed method can achieve 99.2% accuracy, which outperforms other state-of-the-art floor estimation methods.

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui-Seon Gang ◽  
Jae-Young Pyun

As smartphone built-in sensors, wireless technologies, and processor computing power become more advanced and global positioning system (GPS)-based positioning technologies are improving, location-based services (LBS) have become a part of our daily lives. At the same time, demand has grown for LBS applications in indoor environments, such as indoor path finding and navigation, marketing, entertainment, and location-based information retrieval. In this paper, we demonstrate the design and implementation of a smartphone-based indoor LBS system for location services consisting of smartphone applications and a server. The proposed indoor LBS system uses hybrid indoor positioning methods based on Bluetooth beacons, Geomagnetic field, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors, and smartphone cameras and can be used for three types of indoor LBS applications. The performance of each positioning method demonstrates that our system retains the desired accuracy under experimental conditions. As these results illustrate that our system can maintain positioning accuracy to within 2 m 80% of the time, we believe our system can be a real solution for various indoor positioning service needs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 437
Author(s):  
Hongxia Qi ◽  
Yunjia Wang ◽  
Jingxue Bi ◽  
Hongji Cao ◽  
Shenglei Xu

Floor positioning is an important aspect of indoor positioning technology, which is closely related to location-based services (LBSs). Currently, floor positioning technologies are mainly based on radio signals and barometric pressure. The former are impacted by the multipath effect, rely on infrastructure support, and are limited by different spatial structures. For the latter, the air pressure changes with the temperature and humidity, the deployment cost of the reference station is high, and different terminal models need to be calibrated in advance. In view of these issues, here, we propose a novel floor positioning method based on human activity recognition (HAR), using smartphone built-in sensor data to classify pedestrian activities. We obtain the degree of the floor change according to the activity category of every step and determine whether the pedestrian completes floor switching through condition and threshold analysis. Then, we combine the previous floor or the high-precision initial floor with the floor change degree to calculate the pedestrians’ real-time floor position. A multi-floor office building was chosen as the experimental site and verified through the process of alternating multiple types of activities. The results show that the pedestrian floor position change recognition and location accuracy of this method were as high as 100%, and that this method has good robustness and high universality. It is more stable than methods based on wireless signals. Compared with one existing HAR-based method and air pressure, the method in this paper allows pedestrians to undertake long-term static or round-trip activities during the process of going up and down the stairs. In addition, the proposed method has good fault tolerance for the misjudgment of pedestrian actions.


Author(s):  
Shih-Hau Fang

Indoor positioning systems have received increasing attention for supporting location-based services in indoor environments. Received signal strength (RSS), mostly utilized in Wi-Fi fingerprinting systems, is known to be unreliable due to two reasons: orientation mismatch and variations in hardware. This chapter introduces an approach based on histogram equalization to compensate for orientation mismatch in robust Wi-Fi localization. The proposed method involves converting the temporal-spatial radio signal strength into a reference function (i.e., equalizing the histogram). This chapter also introduces an enhanced positioning feature, which is called delta-fused principal strength, to enhance the robustness of Wi-Fi localization against the problem of heterogeneous hardware. This algorithm computes the pairwise delta RSS and then integrates with RSS using principal component analysis. The proposed methods effectively and efficiently improve the robustness of location estimation in the presence of mismatch orientation and hardware variations, respectively.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 4351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashraf ◽  
Hur ◽  
Park

The applications of location-based services require precise location information of a user both indoors and outdoors. Global positioning system’s reduced accuracy for indoor environments necessitated the initiation of Indoor Positioning Systems (IPSs). However, the development of an IPS which can determine the user’s position with heterogeneous smartphones in the same fashion is a challenging problem. The performance of Wi-Fi fingerprinting-based IPSs is degraded by many factors including shadowing, absorption, and interference caused by obstacles, human mobility, and body loss. Moreover, the use of various smartphones and different orientations of the very same smartphone can limit its positioning accuracy as well. As Wi-Fi fingerprinting is based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) vector, it is prone to dynamic intrinsic limitations of radio propagation, including changes over time, and far away locations having similar RSS vector. This article presents a Wi-Fi fingerprinting approach that exploits Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) coverage area and does not utilize the RSS vector. Using the concepts of APs coverage area uniqueness and coverage area overlap, the proposed approach calculates the user’s current position with the help of APs’ intersection area. The experimental results demonstrate that the device dependency can be mitigated by making the fingerprinting database with the proposed approach. The experiments performed at a public place proves that positioning accuracy can also be increased because the proposed approach performs well in dynamic environments with human mobility. The impact of human body loss is studied as well.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sajida Imran ◽  
Young-Bae Ko

WLAN based localization is a key technique of location-based services (LBS) indoors. However, the indoor environment is complex; received signal strength (RSS) is highly uncertain, multimodal, and nonlinear. The traditional location estimation methods fail to provide fair estimation accuracy under the said environment. We proposed a novel indoor positioning system that considers the nonlinear discriminative feature extraction of RSS using kernel local Fisher discriminant analysis (KLFDA). KLFDA extracts location features in a well-preserved kernelized space. In the new kernel featured space, nonlinear RSS features are characterized effectively. Along with handling of nonlinearity, KLFDA also copes well with the multimodality in the RSS data. By performing KLFDA, the discriminating information contained in RSS is reorganized and maximally extracted. Prior to feature extraction, we performed outlier detection on RSS data to remove any anomalies present in the data. Experimental results show that the proposed approach obtains higher positioning accuracy by extracting maximal discriminate location features and discarding outlying information present in the RSS data.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Nurul Fatehah Zulkpli ◽  
Nor Azlina Ab. Aziz ◽  
Noor Ziela Abd Rahman ◽  
Rosli Besar

Indoor Positioning System (IPS) is used to locate a person, an object or a location inside a building. IPS is important in providing location-based services, which has recently gain much popularity. The services ease visitors’ navigation at unfamiliar premises. Location-based services depend on the capability of IPS to accurately determine the location of the user, which is a challenging issue in indoor environments. Several wireless technologies are available. In this paper, two of the most widely used IPS technologies are reviewed which are, WiFi and Bluetooth low energy (BLE). Their advantages and disadvantages are reviewed and reported here. Comparison of the systems based on their performance, accuracy and limitations are presented as well.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 2759
Author(s):  
Ji-In Kim ◽  
Hui-Seon Gang ◽  
Jae-Young Pyun ◽  
Goo-Rak Kwon

Numerous studies on positioning technology are ongoing for recognizing the positions of objects accurately. Vision-, sensor-, and signal-based technologies are combined for recognizing the positions of objects outdoors and indoors. While positioning technologies involving wireless communication based on sensors and signals are commonly used in outdoor environments, the performance becomes degraded in indoor environments. Therefore, a vision-based indoor positioning method using a QR code is proposed in this study. A user’s position is measured by determining the current position of a smartphone device accurately based on the QR code recognized with a smartphone camera. The direction, distance, and position are acquired using the relationship between the three-dimensional spatial coordinate information of the camera and the center point coordinates of a two-dimensional planar QR code obtained through camera calibration.


Author(s):  
Tao-Yun Zhou ◽  
Bao-Wang Lian ◽  
Yi Zhang ◽  
Sen Liu

With rapid growth in the demand of location-based services (LBS) in indoor environments, localizations based on fingerprinting have attracted significant interest due to their convenience. Until now, most such methods were based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI), which is vulnerable to non-line-of-sight (NLOS). In order to realize high-precision indoor positioning, we propose a channel state information (CSI)-based Amp-Phi indoor-positioning system which exploits the amplitude and phase information of CSI at the same time to establish a fingerprinting database. Firstly, according to the characteristics of the raw CSI information collected at different positions under different environments, we build an NLOS mitigation model and a phase error mitigation model, respectively, to process the amplitude and phase of CSI. Secondly, we analyze the statistical characteristics of CSI carefully, including maximum, minimum, mean and variance. After being processed with the models, the CSI features can be used to distinguish different positions clearly, which provides a theoretical basis for the indoor positioning based on fingerprinting. Finally, we build a fingerprinting database based on the features of amplitude and phase, realize to locate the target’s position with the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) matching algorithm. Experiments implemented in different situations show that Amp-Pi system is reliable and robust, whose position accuracy is higher than that of PhaseFi, Horus and machine learning (ML) systems under the same condition. It can be used in many scenarios, such as the localization of robots in our daily life, by doctors or patients in the hospital, for people localization in large supermarkets or museums and so on.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 3418
Author(s):  
Balaji Ezhumalai ◽  
Moonbae Song ◽  
Kwangjin Park

Wi-Fi received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint-based indoor positioning has been widely used because of its low cost and universality advantages. However, the Wi-Fi RSS is greatly affected by multipath interference in indoor environments, which can cause significant errors in RSS observations. Many methods have been proposed to overcome this issue, including the average method and the error handling method, but these existing methods do not consider the ever-changing dynamics of RSS in indoor environments. In addition, traditional RSS-based clustering algorithms have been proposed in the literature, but they make clusters without considering the nonlinear similarity between reference points (RPs) and the signal distribution in ever-changing indoor environments. Therefore, to improve the positioning accuracy, this paper presents an improved RSS measurement technique (IRSSMT) to minimize the error of RSS observation by using the number of selected RSS and its median values, and the strongest access point (SAP) information-based clustering technique, which groups the RPs using their SAP similarity. The performance of this proposed method is tested by experiments conducted in two different experimental environments. The results reveal that our proposed method can greatly outperform the existing algorithms and improve the positioning accuracy by 89.06% and 67.48%, respectively.


Author(s):  
F. Hakimpour ◽  
A. Zare Zardiny

Today by extensive use of intelligent mobile phones, increased size of screens and enriching the mobile phones by Global Positioning System (GPS) technology use of location based services have been considered by public users more than ever.. Based on the position of users, they can receive the desired information from different LBS providers. Any LBS system generally includes five main parts: mobile devices, communication network, positioning system, service provider and data provider. By now many advances have been gained in relation to any of these parts; however the users positioning especially in indoor environments is propounded as an essential and critical issue in LBS. It is well known that GPS performs too poorly inside buildings to provide usable indoor positioning. On the other hand, current indoor positioning technologies such as using RFID or WiFi network need different hardware and software infrastructures. In this paper, we propose a new method to overcome these challenges. This method is using the Quick Response (QR) Code Technology. QR Code is a 2D encrypted barcode with a matrix structure which consists of black modules arranged in a square grid. Scanning and data retrieving process from QR Code is possible by use of different camera-enabled mobile phones only by installing the barcode reader software. This paper reviews the capabilities of QR Code technology and then discusses the advantages of using QR Code in Indoor LBS (ILBS) system in comparison to other technologies. Finally, some prospects of using QR Code are illustrated through implementation of a scenario. The most important advantages of using this new technology in ILBS are easy implementation, spending less expenses, quick data retrieval, possibility of printing the QR Code on different products and no need for complicated hardware and software infrastructures.


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