Fusing WiFi and video sensing for accurate group detection in indoor spaces

Singapore National Research Foundation under IDM Futures Funding Initiativ

MULTI-SENSOR LOCALIZATION AND TRACKING IN DISASTER MANAGEMENT AND INDOOR WAYFINDING FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS

This dissertation proposes a series of multi-sensor localization and tracking algorithms particularly developed for two important application domains, which are disaster management and indoor wayfinding for blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. For disaster management, we developed two different localization algorithms, one each for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, which enable the disaster management system to track patients in real-time. Both algorithms work in the absence of any pre-deployed infrastructure along with smartphones and wearable devices. Regarding indoor wayfinding for BVI users, we have explored several types of indoor positioning techniques including BLE-based, inertial, visual and hybrid approaches to offer accurate and reliable location and orientation in complex navigation spaces. In this dissertation, significant contributions have been made in the design and implementation of various localization and tracking algorithms under different requirements of certain applications

User Experience Enhancement on Smartphones using Wireless Communication Technologies

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2020. 8. 박세웅.Recently, various sensors as well as wireless communication technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have been equipped with smartphones. In addition, in many cases, users use a smartphone while on the move, so if a wireless communication technologies and various sensors are used for a mobile user, a better user experience can be provided. For example, when a user moves while using Wi-Fi, the user experience can be improved by providing a seamless Wi-Fi service. In addition, it is possible to provide a special service such as indoor positioning or navigation by estimating the users mobility in an indoor environment, and additional services such as location-based advertising and payment systems can also be provided. Therefore, improving the user experience by using wireless communication technology and smartphones sensors is considered to be an important research field in the future. In this dissertation, we propose three systems that can improve the user experience or convenience by usingWi-Fi, BLE, and smartphones sensors: (i) BLEND: BLE beacon-aided fast Wi-Fi handoff for smartphones, (ii) PYLON: Smartphone based Indoor Path Estimation and Localization without Human Intervention, (iii) FINISH: Fully-automated Indoor Navigation using Smartphones with Zero Human Assistance. First, we propose fast handoff scheme called BLEND exploiting BLE as secondary radio. We conduct detailed analysis of the sticky client problem on commercial smartphones with experiment and close examination of Android source code. We propose BLEND, which exploits BLE modules to provide smartphones with prior knowledge of the presence and information of APs operating at 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi channels. BLEND operating with only application requires no hardware and Android source code modification of smartphones.We prototype BLEND with commercial smartphones and evaluate the performance in real environment. Our measurement results demonstrate that BLEND significantly improves throughput and video bitrate by up to 61% and 111%, compared to a commercial Android application, respectively, with negligible energy overhead. Second, we design a path estimation and localization system, termed PYLON, which is plug-and-play on Android smartphones. PYLON includes a novel landmark correction scheme that leverages real doors of indoor environments consisting of floor plan mapping, door passing time detection and correction. It operates without any user intervention. PYLON relaxes some requirements for localization systems. It does not require any modifications to hardware or software of smartphones, and the initial location of WiFi APs, BLE beacons, and users. We implement PYLON on five Android smartphones and evaluate it on two office buildings with the help of three participants to prove applicability and scalability. PYLON achieves very high floor plan mapping accuracy with a low localization error. Finally, We design a fully-automated navigation system, termed FINISH, which addresses the problems of existing previous indoor navigation systems. FINISH generates the radio map of an indoor building based on the localization system to determine the initial location of the user. FINISH relaxes some requirements for current indoor navigation systems. It does not require any human assistance to provide navigation instructions. In addition, it is plug-and-play on Android smartphones. We implement FINISH on five Android smartphones and evaluate it on five floors of an office building with the help of multiple users to prove applicability and scalability. FINISH determines the location of the user with extremely high accuracy with in one step. In summary, we propose systems that enhance the users convenience and experience by utilizing wireless infrastructures such as Wi-Fi and BLE and various smartphones sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, and barometer equipped in smartphones. Systems are implemented on commercial smartphones to verify the performance through experiments. As a result, systems show the excellent performance that can enhance the users experience.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Overview of Existing Approaches 3 1.2.1 Wi-Fi handoff for smartphones 3 1.2.2 Indoor path estimation and localization 4 1.2.3 Indoor navigation 5 1.3 Main Contributions 7 1.3.1 BLEND: BLE Beacon-aided Fast Handoff for Smartphones 7 1.3.2 PYLON: Smartphone Based Indoor Path Estimation and Localization with Human Intervention 8 1.3.3 FINISH: Fully-automated Indoor Navigation using Smartphones with Zero Human Assistance 9 1.4 Organization of Dissertation 10 2 BLEND: BLE Beacon-Aided FastWi-Fi Handoff for Smartphones 11 2.1 Introduction 11 2.2 Related Work 14 2.2.1 Wi-Fi-based Handoff 14 2.2.2 WPAN-aided AP Discovery 15 2.3 Background 16 2.3.1 Handoff Procedure in IEEE 802.11 16 2.3.2 BSS Load Element in IEEE 802.11 16 2.3.3 Bluetooth Low Energy 17 2.4 Sticky Client Problem 17 2.4.1 Sticky Client Problem of Commercial Smartphone 17 2.4.2 Cause of Sticky Client Problem 20 2.5 BLEND: Proposed Scheme 21 2.5.1 Advantages and Necessities of BLE as Secondary Low-Power Radio 21 2.5.2 Overall Architecture 22 2.5.3 AP Operation 23 2.5.4 Smartphone Operation 24 2.5.5 Verification of aTH estimation 28 2.6 Performance Evaluation 30 2.6.1 Implementation and Measurement Setup 30 2.6.2 Saturated Traffic Scenario 31 2.6.3 Video Streaming Scenario 35 2.7 Summary 38 3 PYLON: Smartphone based Indoor Path Estimation and Localization without Human Intervention 41 3.1 Introduction 41 3.2 Background and Related Work 44 3.2.1 Infrastructure-Based Localization 44 3.2.2 Fingerprint-Based Localization 45 3.2.3 Model-Based Localization 45 3.2.4 Dead Reckoning 46 3.2.5 Landmark-Based Localization 47 3.2.6 Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) 47 3.3 System Overview 48 3.3.1 Notable RSSI Signature 49 3.3.2 Smartphone Operation 50 3.3.3 Server Operation 51 3.4 Path Estimation 52 3.4.1 Step Detection 52 3.4.2 Step Length Estimation 54 3.4.3 Walking Direction 54 3.4.4 Location Update 55 3.5 Landmark Correction Part 1: Virtual Room Generation 56 3.5.1 RSSI Stacking Difference 56 3.5.2 Virtual Room Generation 57 3.5.3 Virtual Graph Generation 59 3.5.4 Physical Graph Generation 60 3.6 Landmark Correction Part 2: From Floor Plan Mapping to Path Correction 60 3.6.1 Candidate Graph Generation 60 3.6.2 Backbone Node Mapping 62 3.6.3 Dead-end Node Mapping 65 3.6.4 Final Candidate Graph Selection 66 3.6.5 Door Passing Time Detection 68 3.6.6 Path Correction 70 3.7 Particle Filter 71 3.8 Performance Evaluation 73 3.8.1 Implementation and Measurement Setup 73 3.8.2 Step Detection Accuracy 77 3.8.3 Floor Plan Mapping Accuracy 77 3.8.4 Door Passing Time 78 3.8.5 Walking Direction and Localization Performance 81 3.8.6 Impact of WiFi AP and BLE Beacon Number 84 3.8.7 Impact of Walking Distance and Speed 84 3.8.8 Performance on Different Areas 87 3.9 Summary 87 4 FINISH: Fully-automated Indoor Navigation using Smartphones with Zero Human Assistance 91 4.1 Introduction 91 4.2 Related Work 92 4.2.1 Localization-based Navigation System 92 4.2.2 Peer-to-peer Navigation System 93 4.3 System Overview 93 4.3.1 System Architecture 93 4.3.2 An Example for Navigation 95 4.4 Level Change Detection and Floor Decision 96 4.4.1 Level Change Detection 96 4.5 Real-time navigation 97 4.5.1 Initial Floor and Location Decision 97 4.5.2 Orientation Adjustment 98 4.5.3 Shortest Path Estimation 99 4.6 Performance Evaluation 99 4.6.1 Initial Location Accuracy 99 4.6.2 Real-Time Navigation Accuracy 100 4.7 Summary 101 5 Conclusion 102 5.1 Research Contributions 102 5.2 Future Work 103 Abstract (In Korean) 118 감사의 글Docto

Data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings: Overview, challenges and novel orientations

Recently, tremendous interest has been devoted to develop data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings, where various kinds of information can be processed. However, applying the appropriate data fusion strategy to design an efficient energy efficiency system is not straightforward; it requires a priori knowledge of existing fusion strategies, their applications and their properties. To this regard, seeking to provide the energy research community with a better understanding of data fusion strategies in building energy saving systems, their principles, advantages, and potential applications, this paper proposes an extensive survey of existing data fusion mechanisms deployed to reduce excessive consumption and promote sustainability. We investigate their conceptualizations, advantages, challenges and drawbacks, as well as performing a taxonomy of existing data fusion strategies and other contributing factors. Following, a comprehensive comparison of the state-of-the-art data fusion based energy efficiency frameworks is conducted using various parameters, including data fusion level, data fusion techniques, behavioral change influencer, behavioral change incentive, recorded data, platform architecture, IoT technology and application scenario. Moreover, a novel method for electrical appliance identification is proposed based on the fusion of 2D local texture descriptors, where 1D power signals are transformed into 2D space and treated as images. The empirical evaluation, conducted on three real datasets, shows promising performance, in which up to 99.68% accuracy and 99.52% F1 score have been attained. In addition, various open research challenges and future orientations to improve data fusion based energy efficiency ecosystems are explored

Advances in crowd analysis for urban applications through urban event detection

The recent expansion of pervasive computing technology has contributed with novel means to pursue human activities in urban space. The urban dynamics unveiled by these means generate an enormous amount of data. These data are mainly endowed by portable and radio-frequency devices, transportation systems, video surveillance, satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, and social networking services. This has opened a new avenue of opportunities, to understand and predict urban dynamics in detail, and plan various real-time services and applications in response to that. Over the last decade, certain aspects of the crowd, e.g., mobility, sentimental, size estimation and behavioral, have been analyzed in detail and the outcomes have been reported. This paper mainly conducted an extensive survey on various data sources used for different urban applications, the state-of-the-art on urban data generation techniques and associated processing methods in order to demonstrate their merits and capabilities. Then, available open-access crowd data sets for urban event detection are provided along with relevant application programming interfaces. In addition, an outlook on a support system for urban application is provided which fuses data from all the available pervasive technology sources and finally, some open challenges and promising research directions are outlined

Temporal convolutional networks for multi-person activity recognition using a 2D LIDAR

Motion trajectories contain rich information about human activities. We propose to use a 2D LIDAR to perform multiple people activity recognition simultaneously by classifying their trajectories. We clustered raw LIDAR data and classified the clusters into human and non-human classes in order to recognize humans in a scenario. For the clusters of humans, we implemented the Kalman Filter to track their trajectories which are further segmented and labelled with corresponding activities. We introduced spatial transformation and Gaussian noise for trajectory augmentation in order to overcome the problem of unbalanced classes and boost the performance of human activity recognition (HAR). Finally, we built two neural networks including a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to classify trajectory samples into 15 activity classes collected from a kitchen. The proposed TCN achieved the best result of 99.49% in overall accuracy. In comparison, the TCN is slightly superior to the LSTM network. Both the TCN and the LSTM network outperform hidden Markov Model (HMM), dynamic time warping (DTW), and support vector machine (SVM) with a wide margin. Our approach achieves a higher activity recognition accuracy than the related work

The Evolution of Wi-Fi Technology in Human Motion Recognition: Concepts, Techniques and Future Works

. Human motion recognition is an important topic in computer vision as well as security. It is used in scientific research, surveillance cameras industry and robotics technology as well. The human interaction with the objects creates a complex stance. Multiple artefacts such as clutter, occlusions, and backdrop diversity contribute to the complexity of this technology. Wi-Fi signals with the usage of their features could help solve some of these issues, with the help of other wearable sensors, such as: RGB-D camera, IR sensor (thermal camera), inertial sensor etc. This paper reviews various approaches for Wi-Fi human motion recognition systems, their analytical methodologies, challenges and proposed techniques along with the aspects to this paper: (a) applications; (b) single and multi-modality sensing; (c) Wi-Fi-based techniques; d) challenges and future works. More research related to Wi-Fi human related activity recognition can be encouraged and improved

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions