Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

LCrowdV: Generating Labeled Videos for Simulation-based Crowd Behavior Learning

We present a novel procedural framework to generate an arbitrary number of labeled crowd videos (LCrowdV). The resulting crowd video datasets are used to design accurate algorithms or training models for crowded scene understanding. Our overall approach is composed of two components: a procedural simulation framework for generating crowd movements and behaviors, and a procedural rendering framework to generate different videos or images. Each video or image is automatically labeled based on the environment, number of pedestrians, density, behavior, flow, lighting conditions, viewpoint, noise, etc. Furthermore, we can increase the realism by combining synthetically-generated behaviors with real-world background videos. We demonstrate the benefits of LCrowdV over prior lableled crowd datasets by improving the accuracy of pedestrian detection and crowd behavior classification algorithms. LCrowdV would be released on the WWW

Design and realization of precise indoor localization mechanism for Wi-Fi devices

Despite the abundant literature in the field, there is still the need to find a time-efficient, highly accurate, easy to deploy and robust localization algorithm for real use. The algorithm only involves minimal human intervention. We propose an enhanced Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) based positioning algorithm for Wi-Fi capable devices, called the Dynamic Weighted Evolution for Location Tracking (DWELT). Due to the multiple phenomena affecting the propagation of radio signals, RSSI measurements show fluctuations that hinder the utilization of straightforward positioning mechanisms from widely known propagation loss models. Instead, DWELT uses data processing of raw RSSI values and applies a weighted posterior-probabilistic evolution for quick convergence of localization and tracking. In this paper, we present the first implementation of DWELT, intended for 1D location (applicable to tunnels or corridors), and the first step towards a more generic implementation. Simulations and experiments show an accuracy of 1m in more than 81% of the cases, and less than 2m in the 95%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Advanced real-time indoor tracking based on the Viterbi algorithm and semantic data

A real-time indoor tracking system based on the Viterbi algorithm is developed. This Viterbi principle is used in combination with semantic data to improve the accuracy, that is, the environment of the object that is being tracked and a motion model. The starting point is a fingerprinting technique for which an advanced network planner is used to automatically construct the radio map, avoiding a time consuming measurement campaign. The developed algorithm was verified with simulations and with experiments in a building-wide testbed for sensor experiments, where a median accuracy below 2 m was obtained. Compared to a reference algorithm without Viterbi or semantic data, the results indicated a significant improvement: the mean accuracy and standard deviation improved by, respectively, 26.1% and 65.3%. Thereafter a sensitivity analysis was conducted to estimate the influence of node density, grid size, memory usage, and semantic data on the performance

Robust pedestrian detection and tracking in crowded scenes

In this paper, a robust computer vision approach to detecting and tracking pedestrians in unconstrained crowded scenes is presented. Pedestrian detection is performed via a 3D clustering process within a region-growing framework. The clustering process avoids using hard thresholds by using bio-metrically inspired constraints and a number of plan view statistics. Pedestrian tracking is achieved by formulating the track matching process as a weighted bipartite graph and using a Weighted Maximum Cardinality Matching scheme. The approach is evaluated using both indoor and outdoor sequences, captured using a variety of different camera placements and orientations, that feature significant challenges in terms of the number of pedestrians present, their interactions and scene lighting conditions. The evaluation is performed against a manually generated groundtruth for all sequences. Results point to the extremely accurate performance of the proposed approach in all cases