Automatic Construction of Floor Plan with Smartphone Sensors

Abstract

Indoor floor plans are of vital importance for a wide range of indoor social applications, however, they are often unavailable due to various reasons. This paper proposes a method to automatically construct the indoor floor plan with rooms and corridors as well as landmarks, using inertial traces collected with smartphones. Landmarks, such as turnings, doors, and stairs, are identified according to inertial sensors and WiFi signals. The inertial traces are then partitioned into segments according to the turnings and classified as room type or corridor type according to the doors. Clustering is applied on room type and corridor type trace segments separately to produce room type and corridor type clusters. The construction of room applies the α-shape algorithm on room type clusters and the construction of corridor employs the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm or the α-shape algorithm on corridor type clusters. Evaluations in two representative scenarios show that the method can construct the floor plan of acceptable accuracy with a relatively small set of inertial traces.