CrowdLOC-S: Crowdsourced seamless localization framework based on CNN-LSTM-MLP enhanced quality indicator

Abstract

Seamless positioning ability has become an essential requirement in large-scale smart city scenes with the development of Artificial Intelligence of Things technology. The performance of seamless positioning is limited by the inaccurate crowdsourced navigation database, cumulative error of built-in sensors, and changeable measurement errors of different location sources. In order to solve these problems, this paper presents the CrowdLOC-S framework, which provides a concrete and accurate indoor/outdoor localization performance using the combination of crowdsourced Wi-Fi fingerprinting, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and low-cost sensors. A data and model dual-driven based trajectory estimator is developed for improving the long-term positioning performance of built-in sensors, and a hybrid one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN), Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) enhanced quality indicator is proposed for quality evaluation of crowdsourced trajectories and further Wi-Fi fingerprinting database construction. Besides, the transfer learning approach is applied in the quality indicator for autonomously predicting the location errors towards different indoor and outdoor location sources and realizing seamless scenes switching. Finally, a unified extended Kalman filter is developed to realize multi-source integration-based seamless localization using the positioning information provided by indoor and outdoor location sources and corresponding quality indicator results. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the presented CrowdLOC-S system is proven to realize precise and efficient indoor and outdoor positioning performance in complex and large-scale urban environments.