Fast and Reliable WiFi Fingerprint Collection for Indoor Localization

Abstract: 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 require active user participation. We will show that besides fast fingerprint data collection, the proposed method results in accurate location estimate compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method is an order of magnitude faster than the manual fingerprint collection method, and using the radio map generated by our method achieves a much better accuracy compared to the existing methods.