Discriminative Learning-based Smartphone Indoor Localization

Abstract: 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 high and stable performance, we first apply discriminative learning models to integrate Wi-Fi and magnetic field readings to achieve room level landmark detection. Further, we integrate landmark detection, range-based localization models, with a graph-based discretized system state representation. Because our approach requires only discriminative learning-based room level landmark detections, the time spent in the learning phase is significantly reduced compared to traditional Wi-Fi fingerprinting or landmark-based approaches. We conduct experimental studies to evaluate our system in an office-like indoor environment. Experiment results show that our system can significantly reduce the learning efforts, and the localization method can achieve performance with an average localization error of 1.55 meters.