Accurate WiFi based indoor positioning with continuous location sampling

van Engelen J.E., van Lier J.J., Takes F.W., Trautmann H


Zusammenfassung
The ubiquity of WiFi access points and the sharp increase in WiFi-enabled devices carried by humans have paved the way for WiFi- based indoor positioning and location analysis. Locating people in indoor environments has numerous applications in robotics, crowd control, indoor facility optimization, and automated environment mapping. However, existing WiFi-based positioning systems suffer from two major problems: (1) their accuracy and precision is limited due to inherent noise induced by indoor obstacles, and (2) they only occasionally provide location esti- mates, namely when a WiFi-equipped device emits a signal. To mitigate these two issues, we propose a novel Gaussian process (GP) model for WiFi signal strength measurements. It allows for simultaneous smoothing (increasing accuracy and precision of estimators) and interpolation (en- abling continuous sampling of location estimates). Furthermore, simple and efficient smoothing methods for location estimates are introduced to improve localization performance in real-time settings. Experiments are conducted on two data sets from a large real-world commercial indoor retail environment. Results demonstrate that our approach provides sig- nificant improvements in terms of precision and accuracy with respect to unfiltered data. Ultimately, the GP model realizes continuous location sampling with consistently high quality location estimates.

Schlüsselwörter
indoor positioning; Gaussian processes; crowd flow analysis; machine learning; WiFi



Publikationstyp
Forschungsartikel in Sammelband (Konferenz)

Begutachtet
Ja

Publikationsstatus
Veröffentlicht

Jahr
2018

Konferenz
Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Database (ECML/PKDD)

Konferenzort
Dublin, Ireland

Erste Seite
524

Letzte Seite
540

Verlag
Springer

Sprache
Englisch