Machine Learning Algorithm for Wireless Indoor Localization

Smartphones equipped with Wi-Fi technology are widely used nowadays. Due to the need for inexpensive indoor positioning systems (IPSs), many researchers have focused on Wi-Fi-based IPSs, which use wireless local area network received signal strength (RSS) data that are collected at distinct locations in indoor environments called reference points. In this study, a new framework based on symmetric Bregman divergence, which incorporates k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification in signal space, was proposed. The coordinates of the target were determined as a weighted combination of the nearest fingerprints using Jensen-Bregman divergences, which unify the squared Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances with information-theoretic Jensen-Shannon divergence measures. To validate our work, the performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with the probabilistic neural network and multivariate Kullback-Leibler divergence. The distance error for the developed algorithm was less than 1 m

Design of Indoor Positioning Systems Based on Location Fingerprinting Technique

Positioning systems enable location-awareness for mobile computers in ubiquitous and pervasive wireless computing. By utilizing location information, location-aware computers can render location-based services possible for mobile users. Indoor positioning systems based on location fingerprints of wireless local area networks have been suggested as a viable solution where the global positioning system does not work well. Instead of depending on accurate estimations of angle or distance in order to derive the location with geometry, the fingerprinting technique associates location-dependent characteristics such as received signal strength to a location and uses these characteristics to infer the location. The advantage of this technique is that it is simple to deploy with no specialized hardware required at the mobile station except the wireless network interface card. Any existing wireless local area network infrastructure can be reused for this kind of positioning system. While empirical results and performance studies of such positioning systems are presented in the literature, analytical models that can be used as a framework for efficiently designing the positioning systems are not available. This dissertation develops an analytical model as a design tool and recommends a design guideline for such positioning systems in order to expedite the deployment process. A system designer can use this framework to strike a balance between the accuracy, the precision, the location granularity, the number of access points, and the location spacing. A systematic study is used to analyze the location fingerprint and discover its unique properties. The location fingerprint based on the received signal strength is investigated. Both deterministic and probabilistic approaches of location fingerprint representations are considered. The main objectives of this work are to predict the performance of such systems using a suitable model and perform sensitivity analyses that are useful for selecting proper system parameters such as number of access points and minimum spacing between any two different locations

Cooperative Localization in Mines Using Fingerprinting and Neural Networks

This work is a special investigation in the localization of users in underground and confined areas such as gold mines. It sheds light on the basic approaches that are used nowadays to estimate the position and track users using wireless technology. Localization or Geo-location in confined and underground areas is one of the topics under research in mining labs and industries. The position of personnel and equipments in areas such as mines is of high importance because it improves industrial safety and security. Due to the special nature of underground environments, signals transmitted in a mine gallery suffer severe multipath effects caused by reflection, refraction, diffraction and collision with humid rough surfaces. In such cases and in cases where the signals are blocked due to the non-line of sight (NLOS) regions, traditional localization techniques based on the RSS, AOA and TOA/TDOA lead to high position estimation errors. One of the proposed solutions to such challenging situations is based on extracting the channel impulse response fingerprints with reference to one wireless receiver and using an artificial neural network as the matching algorithm. In this work we study this approach in a multiple access network where multiple access points are present. The diversity of the collected fingerprints allows us to create artificial neural networks that work separately or cooperatively using the same localization technique. In this approach, the received signals by the mobile at various distances are analysed and several components of each signal are extracted accordingly. The channel impulse response found at each position is unique to the position of the receiver. The parameters extracted from the CIR are the received signal strength, mean excess delay, root mean square, maximum excess delay, the number of multipath components, the total power of the received signal, the power of the first arrival and the delay of the first arrival. The use of multiple fingerprints from multiple references not only adds diversity to the set of inputs fed to the neural network but it also enhances the overall concept and makes it applicable in a multi-access environment. Localization is analyzed in the presence of two receivers using several position estimation procedures. The results showed that using two CIRs in a cooperative localization technique gives a position accuracy less than or equal to 1m for 90% of both trained and untrained neural networks. Another way of using cooperative intelligence is by using the time domain including tracking, probabilities and previous positions to the localization system. Estimating new positions based on previous positions recorded in history has a great improvement factor on the accuracy of the localization system where it showed an estimation error of less than 50cm for 90% of training data and 65cm for testing data. The details of those techniques and the estimation errors and graphs are fully presented and they show that using cooperative artificial intelligence in the presence of multiple signatures from different reference points as well as using tracking improves significantly the accuracy, precision, scalability and the overall performance of the localization system

Investigation of indoor localization with ambient FM radio stations

Localization plays an essential role in many ubiquitous computing applications. While the outdoor location-aware services based on GPS are becoming increasingly popular, their proliferation to indoor environments is limited due to the lack of widely available indoor localization systems. The de-facto standard for indoor positioning is based on Wi-Fi and while other localization alternatives exist, they either require expensive hardware or provide a low accuracy. This paper presents an investigation into localization system that leverages signals of broadcasting FM radio stations. The FM stations provide a worldwide coverage, while FM tuners are readily available in many mobile devices. The experimental results show that FM radio can be used for indoor localization, while providing longer battery life than Wi-Fi, making FM an alternative to consider for positioning.Comment: 10th IEEE Pervasive Computing and Communication conference, PerCom 2012, pp. 171 - 17

Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization

The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

A Soft Range Limited K-Nearest Neighbours Algorithm for Indoor Localization Enhancement

This paper proposes a soft range limited K nearest neighbours (SRL-KNN) localization fingerprinting algorithm. The conventional KNN determines the neighbours of a user by calculating and ranking the fingerprint distance measured at the unknown user location and the reference locations in the database. Different from that method, SRL-KNN scales the fingerprint distance by a range factor related to the physical distance between the user's previous position and the reference location in the database to reduce the spatial ambiguity in localization. Although utilizing the prior locations, SRL-KNN does not require knowledge of the exact moving speed and direction of the user. Moreover, to take into account of the temporal fluctuations of the received signal strength indicator (RSSI), RSSI histogram is incorporated into the distance calculation. Actual on-site experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm achieves an average localization error of $0.66$ m with $80\%$ of the errors under $0.89$ m, which outperforms conventional KNN algorithms by $45\%$ under the same test environment.Comment: Received signal strength indicator (RSSI), WiFi indoor localization, K-nearest neighbor (KNN), fingerprint-based localizatio

Using a Cell-based WLAN Infrastructure Design for Resource-effective and Accurate Positioning

A large scale WLAN infrastructure requires the placement of many thousands of access points (APs). The current approach is to deploy these in an empirical and ad-hoc manner. However, this deployment results in poor resource utilization and inaccurate positioning due to signal overlap and black spots. In this paper, we propose three structured approaches to WLAN infrastructure deployment that would allow better positioning accuracy and optimal coverage. These three approaches make use of triangular, square, and hexagonal configurations. Our results show that all three are more effective in both 2-D and 3-D space than any of the current ad-hoc or empirical approaches to AP deployment. Overall, the hexagonal approach is the most cost effective and accurate. It allows better positioning with fewer APs than are normally used. As a further contribution, 3-D rendering of buildings and wireless signal coverage could give engineers a concrete visualization that helps them to foresee where the blind spots are in advance and how signal varied across multi-story buildings, such that engineers could estimate the optimal number of APs and where they should be placed

A New Three-Dimensional Indoor Positioning Mechanism Based on Wireless LAN

The researches on two-dimensional indoor positioning based on wireless LAN and the location fingerprint methods have become mature, but in the actual indoor positioning situation, users are also concerned about the height where they stand. Due to the expansion of the range of three-dimensional indoor positioning, more features must be needed to describe the location fingerprint. Directly using a machine learning algorithm will result in the reduced ability of classification. To solve this problem, in this paper, a “divide and conquer” strategy is adopted; that is, first through k-medoids algorithm the three-dimensional location space is clustered into a number of service areas, and then a multicategory SVM with less features is created for each service area for further positioning. Our experiment shows that the error distance resolution of the approach with k-medoids algorithm and multicategory SVM is higher than that of the approach only with SVM, and the former can effectively decrease the “crazy prediction.