scholarly journals INDOOR POSITIONING BY VISUAL-INERTIAL ODOMETRY

Author(s):  
M. Ramezani ◽  
D. Acharya ◽  
F. Gu ◽  
K. Khoshelham

Indoor positioning is a fundamental requirement of many indoor location-based services and applications. In this paper, we explore the potential of low-cost and widely available visual and inertial sensors for indoor positioning. We describe the Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) approach and propose a measurement model for omnidirectional visual-inertial odometry (OVIO). The results of experiments in two simulated indoor environments show that the OVIO approach outperforms VIO and achieves a positioning accuracy of 1.1 % of the trajectory length.

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Guenther Retscher ◽  
Jonathan Kleine ◽  
Lisa Whitemore

Abstract More and more sensors and receivers are found nowadays in smartphones which can enable and improve positioning for Location-based Services and other navigation applications. Apart from inertial sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscope and magnetometer, receivers for Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and GNSS signals can be employed for positioning of a mobile user. In this study, three trilateration methods for Wi-Fi positioning are investigated whereby the influence of the derivation of the relationship between the received signal strength (RSS) and the range to an Access Points (AP) are analyzed. The first approach is a straightforward resection for point determination and the second is based on the calculation of the center of gravity in a triangle of APs while weighting the received RSS. In the third method a differential approach is employed where as in Differential GNSS (DGNSS) corrections are derived and applied to the raw RSS measurements. In this Differential Wi-Fi (DWi-Fi) method, reference stations realized by low-cost Raspberry Pi units are used to model temporal RSS variations. In the experiments in this study two different indoor environments are used, one in a laboratory and the second in the entrance of an office building. The results of the second and third approach show position deviations from the ground truth of around 2 m in dependence of the geometrical point location. Furthermore, the transition between GNSS positioning outdoors and Wi-Fi localization indoors in the entrance area of the building is studied.


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.


Author(s):  
Gints Jekabsons ◽  
Vadim Kairish ◽  
Vadim Zuravlyov

An Analysis of Wi-Fi Based Indoor Positioning AccuracyThe increasing demand for location based services inside buildings has made indoor positioning a significant research topic. This study deals with indoor positioning using the Wireless Ethernet IEEE 802.11 (Wireless Fidelity, Wi-Fi) standard that has a distinct advantage of low cost over other indoor wireless technologies. The aim of this study is to examine several aspects of location fingerprinting based indoor positioning that affect positioning accuracy. Overall, the positioning accuracy achieved in the performed experiments is 2.0 to 2.5 meters.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2769
Author(s):  
Jingjing Wang ◽  
Joongoo Park

Received signal strength indication (RSSI) obtained by Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is widely used in range-based and fingerprint location systems due to its low cost and low complexity. However, RSS is affected by noise signals and multi-path, and its positioning performance is not stable. In recent years, many commercial WiFi devices support the acquisition of physical layer channel state information (CSI). CSI is an index that can characterize the signal characteristics with more fine granularity than RSS. Compared with RSS, CSI can avoid the effects of multi-path and noise by analyzing the characteristics of multi-channel sub-carriers. To improve the indoor location accuracy and algorithm efficiency, this paper proposes a hybrid fingerprint location technology based on RSS and CSI. In the off-line phase, to overcome the problems of low positioning accuracy and fingerprint drift caused by signal instability, a methodology based on the Kalman filter and a Gaussian function is proposed to preprocess the RSSI value and CSI amplitude value, and the improved CSI phase is incorporated after the linear transformation. The mutation and noisy data are then effectively eliminated, and the accurate and smoother outputs of the RSSI and CSI values can be achieved. Then, the accurate hybrid fingerprint database is established after dimensionality reduction of the obtained high-dimensional data values. The weighted k-nearest neighbor (WKNN) algorithm is applied to reduce the complexity of the algorithm during the online positioning stage, and the accurate indoor positioning algorithm is accomplished. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits good performance on anti-noise ability, fusion positioning accuracy, and real-time filtering. Compared with CSI-MIMO, FIFS, and RSSI-based methods, the proposed fusion correction method has higher positioning accuracy and smaller positioning error.


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):  
Weiyan Chen ◽  
Fusang Zhang ◽  
Tao Gu ◽  
Kexing Zhou ◽  
Zixuan Huo ◽  
...  

Floor plan construction has been one of the key techniques in many important applications such as indoor navigation, location-based services, and emergency rescue. Existing floor plan construction methods require expensive dedicated hardware (e.g., Lidar or depth camera), and may not work in low-visibility environments (e.g., smoke, fog or dust). In this paper, we develop a low-cost Ultra Wideband (UWB)-based system (named UWBMap) that is mounted on a mobile robot platform to construct floor plan through smoke. UWBMap leverages on low-cost and off-the-shelf UWB radar, and it is able to construct an indoor map with an accuracy comparable to Lidar (i.e., the state-of-the-art). The underpinning technique is to take advantage of the mobility of radar to form virtual antennas and gather spatial information of a target. UWBMap also eliminates both robot motion noise and environmental noise to enhance weak reflection from small objects for the robust construction process. In addition, we overcome the limited view of single radar by combining multi-view from multiple radars. Extensive experiments in different indoor environments show that UWBMap achieves a map construction with a median error of 11 cm and a 90-percentile error of 26 cm, and it operates effectively in indoor scenarios with glass wall and dense smoke.


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 (4) ◽  
pp. 875 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaochao Dang ◽  
Xiong Si ◽  
Zhanjun Hao ◽  
Yaning Huang

With the rapid development of wireless network technology, wireless passive indoor localization has become an increasingly important technique that is widely used in indoor location-based services. Channel state information (CSI) can provide more detailed and specific subcarrier information, which has gained the attention of researchers and has become an emphasis in indoor localization technology. However, existing research has generally adopted amplitude information for eigenvalue calculations. There are few research studies that have used phase information from CSI signals for localization purposes. To eliminate the signal interference existing in indoor environments, we present a passive human indoor localization method named FapFi, which fuses CSI amplitude and phase information to fully utilize richer signal characteristics to find location. In the offline stage, we filter out redundant values and outliers in the CSI amplitude information and then process the CSI phase information. A fusion method is utilized to store the processed amplitude and phase information as a fingerprint database. The experimental data from two typical laboratory and conference room environments were gathered and analyzed. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than other algorithms in data processing and achieves decimeter-level localization accuracy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 155014771875766 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jichao Jiao ◽  
Fei Li ◽  
Weihua Tang ◽  
Zhongliang Deng ◽  
Jichang Cao

In this article, we propose a new indoor positioning algorithm using smartphones, where wireless signals and images are deeply combined together to improve the positioning performance. Our approach is based on the use of local binary patterns’ feature, which has the advantages of rotation invariance and scale invariance. Moreover, the term “uniform” are fundamental properties of local image textures and their occurrence histogram is proven to be a very powerful texture feature. Besides, the received signal strength acts as a reliable cue on a person’s identity. We first obtain a coarse-grained estimation based on the visualization of wireless signals, which are presented by a vector, making use of fingerprinting methods. Then, we perform a matching process to determine correspondences between two-dimensional pixels and three-dimensional points based on images collected by the smartphone. After being evaluated by experiments, our proposed method demonstrates that the combination of the visual and the wireless data significantly improves the positioning accuracy and robustness. It can be widely applied to smartphones to better analyze human behavior and offer high-accuracy indoor location–based services.


2019 ◽  
Vol 94 ◽  
pp. 02002
Author(s):  
Guenther Retscher ◽  
Jonathan Kleine ◽  
Lisa Whitemore

In smartphones several sensors and receivers are embedded which enable positioning in Location-based Services and other navigation applications. They include GNSS receivers and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) cards as well as inertial sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscope and magnetometer. In this paper, indoor Wi-Fi positioning is studied based on trilateration. Three methods are investigated which are a resection, a calculation of the center of gravity point and a differential approach. The first approach is a commonly employed resection using the ranges to the Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) as radii and intersect the circles around the APs. In the second method, the center of gravity in a triangle of APs is calculated with weighting of the received signal strength (RSS) of the Wi-Fi signals. The third approach is developed by analogy to Differential GNSS (DGNSS) and therefore termed Differential Wi-Fi (DWi-Fi). Its advantage is that a real-time modeling of the temporal RSS variations and fluctuations is possible. For that purpose, reference stations realized by low-cost Raspberry Pi units are deployed which serve at the same time as APs. The experiments conducted in a laboratory and entrance of an office building showed that position deviations from the ground truth of around 2 m are achievable with the second and third method. Thereby the positioning accuracies depend mainly on the geometrical point location in the triangle of APs and reference stations and the RSS scan duration.


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