Let’s talk about k-NN for indoor positioning: Myths and facts in RF-based fingerprinting

Microsoft proposed RADAR in 2000, the first indoor positioning system based on Wi-Fi fingerprinting. Since then, the indoor research community has worked not only to improve the base estimator but also on finding an optimal RSS data representation. The long-term objective is to find a positioning system that minimises the mean positioning error. Despite the relevant advances in the last 23 years, a disruptive solution has not been reached yet. The evaluation with non-open datasets and comparisons with non-optimized baselines make the analysis of the current status of fingerprinting for indoor positioning difficult. In addition, the lack of implementation details or data used for evaluation in several works make results reproducibility impossible. This paper focuses on providing a comprehensive analysis of fingerprinting with k-NN and settling the basement for replicability and reproducibility in further works, targeting to bring relevant information about k-NN when it is used as a baseline comparison of advanced fingerprint-based methods.The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from projects ORIENTATE H2020-MSCA-IF GA.101023072; FCT UIDB/00319/2020; CYTED Network “GeoLibero”; PID2021-122642OB-C42; and PID2021-122642OB-C44

Comprehensive analysis of distance and similarity measures for Wi-Fi fingerprinting indoor positioning systems

Recent advances in indoor positioning systems led to a business interest in those applications and services where a precise localization is crucial. Wi-Fi fingerprinting based on machine learning and expert systems are commonly used in the literature. They compare a current fingerprint to a database of fingerprints, and then return the most similar one/ones according to: 1) a distance function, 2) a data representation method for received signal strength values, and 3) a thresholding strategy. However, most of the previous works simply use the Euclidean distance with the raw unprocessed data. There is not any previous work that studies which is the best distance function, which is the best way of representing the data and which is the effect of applying thresholding. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study using 51 distance metrics, 4 alternatives to represent the raw data (2 of them proposed by us), a thresholding based on the RSS values and the public UJIIndoorLoc database. The results shown in this paper demonstrate that researchers and developers should take into account the conclusions arisen in this work in order to improve the accuracy of their systems. The IPSs based on k-NN are improved by just selecting the appropriate configuration (mainly distance function and data representation). In the best case, 13-NN with Sørensen distance and the powed data representation, the error in determining the place (building and floor) has been reduced in more than a 50% and the positioning accuracy has been increased in 1.7 m with respect to the 1-NN with Euclidean distance and raw data commonly used in the literature. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that thresholding should not be applied in multi-building and multi-floor environments

Fingerprinting Based Indoor Localization Considering the Dynamic Nature of Wi-Fi Signals

Current localization techniques in the outdoors cannot work well in indoors. The Wi-Fi fingerprinting technique is an emerging localization technique for indoor environments. However, in this technique, the dynamic nature of WiFi signals affects the accuracy of the measurements. In this paper, we use the affinity propagation clustering method to decrease the computation complexity in location estimation. Then, we use the least variance of Received Signal Strength (RSS) measured among Access Points (APs) in each cluster. Also, we assign lower weights to alter APs for each point in a cluster, to represent the level of similarity to Test Point (TP) by considering the dynamic nature of signals in indoor environments. A method for updating the radio map and improving the results is then proposed to decrease the cost of constructing the radio map. Simulation results show that the proposed method has 22.5% improvement in average in localization results, considering one altering AP in the layout, compared to the case when only RSS subset sampling is considered for localization because of altering APs

New Cluster Selection and Fine-grained Search for k-Means Clustering and Wi-Fi Fingerprinting

Ponencia presentada en 2020 International Conference on Localization and GNSS (ICL-GNSS), 02-04 June 2020, Tampere, FinlandWi-Fi fingerprinting is a popular technique for Indoor Positioning Systems (IPSs) thanks to its low complexity and the ubiquity of WLAN infrastructures. However, this technique may present scalability issues when the reference dataset (radio map) is very large. To reduce the computational costs, k-Means Clustering has been successfully applied in the past. However, it is a general-purpose algorithm for unsupervised classification. This paper introduces three variants that apply heuristics based on radio propagation knowledge in the coarse and fine-grained searches. Due to the heterogeneity either in the IPS side (including radio map generation) and in the network infrastructure, we used an evaluation framework composed of 16 datasets. In terms of general positioning accuracy and computational costs, the best proposed k-means variant provided better general positioning accuracy and a significantly better computational cost –around 40% lower– than the original k-means

A mixed approach to similarity metric selection in affinity propagation-based WiFi fingerprinting indoor positioning

The weighted k-nearest neighbors (WkNN) algorithm is by far the most popular choice in the design of fingerprinting indoor positioning systems based on WiFi received signal strength (RSS). WkNN estimates the position of a target device by selecting k reference points (RPs) based on the similarity of their fingerprints with the measured RSS values. The position of the target device is then obtained as a weighted sum of the positions of the k RPs. Two-step WkNN positioning algorithms were recently proposed, in which RPs are divided into clusters using the affinity propagation clustering algorithm, and one representative for each cluster is selected. Only cluster representatives are then considered during the position estimation, leading to a significant computational complexity reduction compared to traditional, flat WkNN. Flat and two-step WkNN share the issue of properly selecting the similarity metric so as to guarantee good positioning accuracy: in two-step WkNN, in particular, the metric impacts three different steps in the position estimation, that is cluster formation, cluster selection and RP selection and weighting. So far, however, the only similarity metric considered in the literature was the one proposed in the original formulation of the affinity propagation algorithm. This paper fills this gap by comparing different metrics and, based on this comparison, proposes a novel mixed approach in which different metrics are adopted in the different steps of the position estimation procedure. The analysis is supported by an extensive experimental campaign carried out in a multi-floor 3D indoor positioning testbed. The impact of similarity metrics and their combinations on the structure and size of the resulting clusters, 3D positioning accuracy and computational complexity are investigated. Results show that the adoption of metrics different from the one proposed in the original affinity propagation algorithm and, in particular, the combination of different metrics can significantly improve the positioning accuracy while preserving the efficiency in computational complexity typical of two-step algorithms

EWOk: towards efficient multidimensional compression of indoor positioning datasets

Indoor positioning performed directly at the end-user device ensures reliability in case the network connection fails but is limited by the size of the RSS radio map necessary to match the measured array to the device’s location. Reducing the size of the RSS database enables faster processing, and saves storage space and radio resources necessary for the database transfer, thus cutting implementation and operation costs, and increasing the quality of service. In this work, we propose EWOk, an Element-Wise cOmpression using k-means, which reduces the size of the individual radio measurements within the fingerprinting radio map while sustaining or boosting the dataset’s positioning capabilities. We show that the 7-bit representation of measurements is sufficient in positioning scenarios, and reducing the data size further using EWOk results in higher compression and faster data transfer and processing. To eliminate the inherent uncertainty of k-means we propose a data-dependent, non-random initiation scheme to ensure stability and limit variance. We further combine EWOk with principal component analysis to show its applicability in combination with other methods, and to demonstrate the efficiency of the resulting multidimensional compression. We evaluate EWOk on 25 RSS fingerprinting datasets and show that it positively impacts compression efficiency, and positioning performance.This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreements No. 813278 (A-WEAR: A network for dynamic wearable applications with privacy constraints, http://www.a-wear.eu/) and No. 101023072 (ORIENTATE: Low-cost Reliable Indoor Positioning in Smart Factories, http://orientate.dsi.uminho.pt) and Academy of Finland (grants #319994, #323244)

Optimum NN Algorithms Parameters on the UJIIndoorLoc for Wi-Fi Fingerprinting Indoor Positioning Systems

Wi-Fi fingerprinting techniques are commonly used in Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) as Wi-Fi signal is available in most indoor settings. In such systems, the position is estimated based on a matching algorithm between the enquiry points and the recorded fingerprint data. In this paper, our objective is to investigate and provide quantitative insight into the performance of various Nearest Neighbour (NN) algorithms. The NN algorithms such as KNN are also often employed in IPS. We extensively study the performance of several NN algorithms on a publicly available dataset, UJIIndoorLoc. Furthermore, we propose an improved version of the Weighted KNN algorithm. The proposed model outperforms the existing works on the UJIIndoorLoc dataset and achieves better results for the success rate and the mean positioning error