An Efficient Radio Map Learning Scheme Based on Kernel Density Function

Abstract

Training an accurate and up-to-date radio map has always been a primary concern for implementing a WiFi fingerprint-based localization system. This paper presents a novel radio map learning scheme for online learning a set of kernel density functions, which function like a traditional radio map in WiFi fingerprint-based localization systems. To be specific, each kernel density function corresponds to one specific access point (AP) and predicts the probability of having a received signal strength (RSS) measurement from this AP at any position. In the offline phase, a set of coarse-grained kernel density functions are initially established by the Multivariate Kernel Density Estimation (MKDE) through a fast site survey. In the online phase, these kernel density functions are recursively refined through Incremental-MKDE (IMKDE) using freshly crowdsourced fingerprints, which essentially fuses the historical features in the previous kernel density functions and up-to-date features in the current fingerprints. A compression technique is applied to improve the computation and storage efficiency. In addition, pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is leveraged to calibrate the location labels of crowdsourced fingerprints. Extensive experiments are carried out in a real scenario of nearly 1000 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m^2$</tex-math></inline-formula> for five months, and a comparison made between the IMKDE based method and several existing popular solutions confirms the superiority of the proposed IMKDE in terms of both computational complexity and localization accuracy.