Automatic Construction of Radio Maps by Crowdsourcing PDR Traces for Indoor Positioning

Abstract

In this work, we propose an automatic radio map construction system based on crowdsourcing Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) traces, which does not rely on priori knowledge of floor plans and is robust to inaccurate PDR traces. In this system, we propose to process some opportunistic PDR traces, in which users walk through the building, to generate parts of road paths by translating, rotating and scaling the traces based on the opportunistic GPS locations and gate points as landmarks. Then, we further extend the coverage of road paths by processing the PDR traces entirely obtained indoor by compensating the turning errors and merging the PDR traces based on the similarity of WiFi fingerprints. With such procedures, we can accurately generate indoor road paths of a large-scale building and construct the radio map based on these road paths. Our proposed method achieves a median accuracy of 2.8m and mean accuracy of 2.9m for the constructed road paths. By fusing GPS, PDR, and WiFi fingerprinting with the crowdsourcing radio map, we achieve a median positioning accuracy of 2.9m and mean accuracy of 3.4m without site surveying, which significantly outperforms the positioning algorithm by merely fusing GPS and PDR.