The smartphone-based offline indoor location competition at IPIN 2016: analysis and future work

This paper presents the analysis and discussion of the off-site localization competition track, which took place during the Seventh International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN 2016). Five international teams proposed different strategies for smartphone-based indoor positioning using the same reference data. The competitors were provided with several smartphone-collected signal datasets, some of which were used for training (known trajectories), and others for evaluating (unknown trajectories). The competition permits a coherent evaluation method of the competitors' estimations, where inside information to fine-tune their systems is not offered, and thus provides, in our opinion, a good starting point to introduce a fair comparison between the smartphone-based systems found in the literature. The methodology, experience, feedback from competitors and future working lines are described.We would like to thank Tecnalia Research & Innovation Foundation for sponsoring the competition track with an award for the winning team. We are also grateful to Francesco Potortì, Sangjoon Park, Jesús Ureña and Kyle O’Keefe for their invaluable help in promoting the IPIN competition and conference. Parts of this work was carried out with the financial support received from projects and grants: LORIS (TIN2012-38080-C04-04), TARSIUS (TIN2015-71564-C4-2-R (MINECO/FEDER)), SmartLoc (CSIC-PIE Ref.201450E011), “Metodologías avanzadas para el diseño, desarrollo, evaluación e integración de algoritmos de localización en interiores” (TIN2015-70202-P), REPNIN network (TEC2015-71426-REDT) and the José Castillejo mobility grant (CAS16/00072). The HFTS team has been supported in the frame of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research programme “FHprofUnt2013” under contract 03FH035PB3 (Project SPIRIT). The UMinho team has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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

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 (75 th 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

An Investigation of Indoor Positioning Systems and their Applications

PhDActivities of Daily Living (ADL) are important indicators of both cognitive and physical well-being in healthy and ill humans. There is a range of methods to recognise ADLs, each with its own limitations. The focus of this research was on sensing location-driven activities, in which ADLs are derived from location sensed using Radio Frequency (RF, e.g., WiFi or BLE), Magnetic Field (MF) and light (e.g., Lidar) measurements in three different environments. This research discovered that different environments can have different constraints and requirements. It investigated how to improve the positioning accuracy and hence how to improve the ADL recognition accuracy. There are several challenges that need to be addressed in order to do this. First, RF location fingerprinting is affected by the heterogeneity smartphones and their orientation with respect to transmitters, increasing the location determination error. To solve this, a novel Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) ranking based location fingerprinting methods that use Kendall Tau Correlation Coefficient (KTCC) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are proposed to correlate a signal position to pre-defined Reference Points (RPs) or fingerprints, more accurately, The accuracy has increased by up to 25.8% when compared to using Euclidean Distance (ED) based Weighted K-Nearest Neighbours Algorithm (WKNN). Second, the use of MF measurements as fingerprints can overcome some additional RF fingerprinting challenges, as MF measurements are far more invariant to static and dynamic physical objects that affect RF transmissions. Hence, a novel fast path matching data algorithm for an MF sensor combined with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to determine direction was researched and developed. It can achieve an average of 1.72 m positioning accuracy when the user walks far fewer (5) steps. Third, a device-free or off-body novel location-driven ADL method based upon 2D Lidar was investigated. An innovative method for recognising daily activities using a Seq2Seq model to analyse location data from a low-cost rotating 2D Lidar is proposed. It provides an accuracy of 88% when recognising 17 targeted ADLs. These proposed methods in this thesis have been validated in real environments.Chinese Scholarship Counci

Sustainable Mobility and Transport

This Special Issue is dedicated to sustainable mobility and transport, with a special focus on technological advancements. Global transport systems are significant sources of air, land, and water emissions. A key motivator for this Special Issue was the diversity and complexity of mitigating transport emissions and industry adaptions towards increasingly stricter regulation. Originally, the Special Issue called for papers devoted to all forms of mobility and transports. The papers published in this Special Issue cover a wide range of topics, aiming to increase understanding of the impacts and effects of mobility and transport in working towards sustainability, where most studies place technological innovations at the heart of the matter. The goal of the Special Issue is to present research that focuses, on the one hand, on the challenges and obstacles on a system-level decision making of clean mobility, and on the other, on indirect effects caused by these changes