Smartphones together with RSSI fingerprinting serve as an efficient approach for delivering a low-cost and high-accuracy indoor localization solution. However, a few critical challenges have prevented the wide-spread proliferation of this technology in the public domain. One such critical challenge is device heterogeneity, i.e., the variation in the RSSI signal characteristics captured across different smartphone devices. In the real-world, the smartphones or IoT devices used to capture RSSI fingerprints typically vary across users of an indoor localization service. Conventional indoor localization solutions may not be able to cope with device-induced variations which can degrade their localization accuracy. We propose a multi-head attention neural network-based indoor localization framework that is resilient to device heterogeneity. An in-depth analysis of our proposed framework across a variety of indoor environments demonstrates up to 35% accuracy improvement compared to state-of-the-art indoor localization techniques.
Wi-Fi fingerprinting-based indoor localization is an emerging embedded application domain that leverages existing Wi-Fi access points (APs) in buildings to localize users with smartphones. Unfortunately, the heterogeneity of wireless transceivers across diverse smartphones carried by users has been shown to reduce the accuracy and reliability of localization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on vision transformer neural networks called VITAL that addresses this important challenge. Experiments indicate that VITAL can reduce the uncertainty created by smartphone hete…
University of Brighton（布莱顿大学）；Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
The continual proliferation of mobile devices has encouraged much effort in using the smartphones for indoor positioning. This article is dedicated to review the most recent and interesting smartphones based indoor navigation systems, ranging from electromagnetic to inertia to visible light ones, with an emphasis on their unique challenges and potential real-world applications. A taxonomy of smartphones sensors will be introduced, which serves as the basis to categorise different positioning systems for reviewing. A set of criteria to be used for the evaluation purpose will be devised. For eac…
We propose an indoor navigation algorithm based on pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) using an inertial measurement unit in a smartphone and map matching. The proposed indoor navigation system is user-friendly and convenient because it requires no additional device except a smartphone and works with a pedestrian in a casual posture who is walking with a smartphone in their hand. Because the performance of the PDR decreases over time, we greatly reduced the position error of the trajectory estimated by PDR using a map matching method with a known indoor map. To verify the proposed indoor navigatio…
A novel multi-scale temporal convolutional network (TCN) and long short-term memory network (LSTM) based magnetic localization approach is proposed. To enhance the discernibility of geomagnetic signals, the time-series preprocessing approach is constructed at first. Next, the TCN is invoked to expand the feature dimensions on the basis of keeping the time-series characteristics of LSTM model. Then, a multi-scale time-series layer is constructed with multiple TCNs of different dilation factors to address the problem of inconsistent time-series speed between localization model and mobile users. …
Localizing smartphones in indoor environments offers excellent opportunities for e-commerce. In this paper, we propose a localization technique for smartphones in indoor environments. This technique can calculate the coordinates of a smartphone using existing illumination infrastructure with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The system can locate smartphones without further modification of the existing LED light infrastructure. Smartphones do not have fixed position and they may move frequently anywhere in an environment. Our algorithm uses multiple (i.e., more than two) LED lights simultaneously.…
Due to the growing area of ubiquitous mobile applications, indoor localization of smartphones has become an interesting research topic. Most of the current indoor localization systems rely on intensive site survey to achieve high accuracy. In this work, we propose an efficient smartphones indoor localization system that is able to reduce the site survey effort while still achieving high localization accuracy. Our system is built by fusing a variety of signals, such as Wi-Fi received signal strength indicator, magnetic field and floor plan information in an enhanced particle filter. To achieve …
The accuracy of smartphone-based positioning methods using WiFi usually suffers from ranging errors caused by non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Previous research usually exploits several statistical features from a long time series (hundreds of samples) of WiFi received signal strength (RSS) or WiFi round-trip time (RTT) to achieve a high identification accuracy. However, the long time series or large sample size attributes to high power and time consumption in data collection for both training and testing. This will also undoubtedly be detrimental to user experience as the waiting time of …
Channel state information (CSI) based fingerprinting for WIFI indoor localization has attracted lots of attention very recently.The frequency diverse and temporally stable CSI better represents the location dependent channel characteristics than the coarsereceived signal strength (RSS). However, the acquisition of CSI requires the cooperation of access points (APs) and involves only dataframes, which imposes restrictions on real-world deployment. In this paper, we present CRISLoc, the first CSI fingerprinting basedlocalization prototype system using ubiquitous smartphones. CRISLoc operates in …
Indoor localization services are a crucial aspect for the realization of smart cyber-physical systems within cities of the future. Such services are poised to reinvent the process of navigation and tracking of people and assets in a variety of indoor and subterranean environments. The growing ownership of computationally capable smartphones has laid the foundations of portable fingerprinting-based indoor localization through deep learning. However, as the demand for accurate localization increases, the computational complexity of the associated deep learning models increases as well. We presen…
The fact that almost every person owns a smartphone device that can be precisely located is both empowering and worrying. If methods for accurate tracking of devices (and their owners) via WiFi probing are developed in a responsible way, they could be applied in many different fields, from data security to urban planning. Numerous approaches to data collection and analysis have been covered, some of which use active sensing equipment, while others rely on passive probing, which takes advantage of nearly universal smartphone usage and WiFi network coverage. In this study, we introduce a system …
Pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) is a potential indoor localization technology that obtains location estimation with the inertial measurement unit (IMU). However, one of its most significant drawbacks is the accumulation of its measurement error. This paper proposes a visible light positioning (VLP)-integrated PDR system, which could achieve real-time and accurate indoor positioning using IMU and the camera sensor of our smartphone. A multi-frame fusion method is proposed in the encoding and decoding process of the system, reaching 98.5% decoding accuracy with a 20-bit-long ID at the height of …
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Localization technology is important for the development of indoor location-based services (LBS). Global Positioning System (GPS) becomes invalid in indoor environments due to the non-line-of-sight issue, so it is urgent to develop a real-time high-accuracy localization approach for smartphones. However, accurate localization is challenging due to issues such as real-time response requirements, limited fingerprint samples and mobile device storage. To address these problems, we propose a novel deep learning architecture: Tensor-Generative Adversarial Network (TGAN). We first introduce a transf…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Soreq NRC（索雷克核研究中心）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）
Smartphones have become a popular tool for indoor localization and position estimation of users. Existing solutions mainly employ Wi-Fi, RFID, and magnetic sensing techniques to track movements in crowded venues. These are highly sensitive to magnetic clutters and depend on local ambient magnetic fields, which frequently degrades their performance. Also, these techniques often require pre-known mapping surveys of the area, or the presence of active beacons, which are not always available. We embed small-volume and large-moment magnets in pre-known locations and arrange them in specific geometr…
The deployment of 5G networks is sometimes questioned due to the impact of ElectroMagnetic Field (EMF) generated by Radio Base Station (RBS) on users. The goal of this work is to analyze such issue from a novel perspective, by comparing RBS EMF against exposure generated by 5G smartphones in commercial deployments. The measurement of exposure from 5G is hampered by several implementation aspects, such as dual connectivity between 4G and 5G, spectrum fragmentation, and carrier aggregation. To face such issues, we deploy a novel framework, called 5G-EA, tailored to the assessment of smartphone a…
The positioning of users using their smartphones represents interesting service for various areas. Position of users can represent valuable information for various service providers. In industry 4.0 smart devices such as smartphone or tablet can help users to react faster in case of emergency. It can help to reduce reaction times for service workers and improve users orientation in the environment, or delegate work to the nearest available employee. In previous work we have described modular positioning system that is able to automatically select optimal positioning module based on available r…
Precise indoor localization is one of the key requirements for fifth Generation (5G) and beyond, concerning various wireless communication systems, whose applications span different vertical sectors. Although many highly accurate methods based on signal fingerprints have been lately proposed for localization, their vast majority faces the problem of degrading performance when deployed in indoor systems, where the propagation environment changes rapidly. In order to address this issue, the crowdsourcing approach has been adopted, according to which the fingerprints are frequently updated in the…
Robotics Institute, University of Michigan（密歇根大学机器人研究所）
WiFi technology has been used pervasively in fine-grained indoor localization, gesture recognition, and adaptive communication. Achieving better performance in these tasks generally boils down to differentiating Line-Of-Sight (LOS) from Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) signal propagation reliably which generally requires expensive/specialized hardware due to the complex nature of indoor environments. Hence, the development of low-cost accurate positioning systems that exploit available infrastructure is not entirely solved. In this paper, we develop a framework for indoor localization and tracking of …
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学）；National Engineering Research Center for Geographic Information System（国家地理信息系统工程技术研究中心）
Fingerprinting is a popular indoor localization technique since it can utilize existing infrastructures (e.g., access points). However, its site survey process is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, which limits the application of such systems in practice. In this paper, motivated by the availability of advanced sensing capabilities in smartphones, we propose a fast and reliable fingerprint collection method to reduce the time and labor required for site survey. The proposed method uses a landmark graph-based method to automatically associate the collected fingerprints, which does not r…
Modeling human mobility has a wide range of applications from urban planning to simulations of disease spread. It is well known that humans spend 80% of their time indoors but modeling indoor human mobility is challenging due to three main reasons: (i) the absence of easily acquirable, reliable, low-cost indoor mobility datasets, (ii) high prediction space in modeling the frequent indoor mobility, and (iii) multi-scalar periodicity and correlations in mobility. To deal with all these challenges, we propose WiFiMod, a Transformer-based, data-driven approach that models indoor human mobility at …
Internet of Things (IoT)-based indoor localization has gained significant popularity recently to satisfy the ever-increasing requirements of indoor Location-based Services (LBS). In this context, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based localization is of interest as it provides a scalable solution independent of any proprietary sensors/modules. Existing IMU-based methodologies, however, are mainly developed based on statistical heading and step length estimation techniques that suffer from cumulative error issues and have extensive computational time requirements limiting their application for r…
Hybrid ventilation is an energy-efficient solution to provide fresh air for most climates, given that it has a reliable control system. To operate such systems optimally, a high-fidelity control-oriented modesl is required. It should enable near-real time forecast of the indoor air temperature based on operational conditions such as window opening and HVAC operating schedules. However, physics-based control-oriented models (i.e., white-box models) are labour-intensive and computationally expensive. Alternatively, black-box models based on artificial neural networks can be trained to be good es…
In the absence of external reference position information (e.g. GNSS) SLAM has proven to be an effective method for indoor navigation. The positioning drift can be reduced with regular loop-closures and global relaxation as the backend, thus achieving a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Although vision-based systems like laser scanners are typically deployed for SLAM, these sensors are heavy, energy inefficient, and expensive, making them unattractive for wearables or smartphone applications. However, the concept of SLAM can be extended to non-optical systems such as magnetome…
Previous contact tracing systems required the users to perform many manual actions, such as installing smartphone applications, joining wireless networks, or carrying custom user devices. This increases the barrier to entry and lowers the user adoption rate. As a result, the contact tracing effectiveness is reduced. Unlike the systems above, we propose a new privacy preserving Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (BLE) contact tracing system that does not require smartphone applications, joining wireless networks, or custom user devices. Our specially built routers seamlessly track smartphones, laptops, smartw…
