A Hybrid Wi-Fi Fingerprint-Based Localization Scheme Achieved by Combining Fisher Score and Stacked Sparse Autoencoder Algorithms

Abstract

Along with the advancement of wireless technology, indoor localization technology based on Wi-Fi has received considerable attention from academia and industry. The fingerprint-based method is the mainstream approach for Wi-Fi indoor localization and can be easily implemented without additional hardware. However, signal fluctuations constitute a critical issue pertaining to the extraction of robust features to achieve the required localization performance. This study presents a fingerprint feature extraction method commonly referred to as the Fisher score–stacked sparse autoencoder (Fisher–SSAE) method. Some features with low Fisher scores were eliminated, and the representative features were then extracted by the SSAE. Furthermore, this study establishes a hybrid localization model constructed with the use of the global model and the submodel to avoid significant coordinate localization errors attributed to subregional localization errors. Combined with three accessible fingerprint-based positioning methods, namely, the support vector regression, random forest regression, and the multiplayer perceptron classification, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods improve the localization accuracy and response time compared to other feature extraction methods and the single localization model. Compared with some state-of-the-art methods, the proposed methods have better localization performances when large number of features are used.