DeepLocBox: Reliable Fingerprinting-Based Indoor Area Localization.

Marius Laska,Jörg Blankenbach

doi:10.3390/s21062000

Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) have gained increasing importance in our everyday lives and serve as the foundation for many smartphone applications. Whereas Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) enable reliable position estimation outdoors, there does not exist any comparable gold standard for indoor localization yet. Wireless local area network (WLAN) fingerprinting is still a promising and widely adopted approach to indoor localization, since it does not rely on preinstalled hardware but uses the existing WLAN infrastructure typically present in buildings. The accuracy of the method is, however, limited due to unstable fingerprints, etc. Deep learning has recently gained attention in the field of indoor localization and is also utilized to increase the performance of fingerprinting-based approaches. Current solutions can be grouped into models that either estimate the exact position of the user (regression) or classify the area (pre-segmented floor plan) or a reference location. We propose a model, DeepLocBox (DLB), that offers reliable area localization in multi-building/multi-floor environments without the prerequisite of a pre-segmented floor plan. Instead, the model predicts a bounding box that contains the user’s position while minimizing the required prediction space (size of the box). We compare the performance of DLB with the standard approach of neural network-based position estimation and demonstrate that DLB achieves a gain in success probability by 9.48% on a self-collected dataset at RWTH Aachen University, Germany; by 5.48% for a dataset provided by Tampere University of Technology (TUT), Finland; and by 3.71% for the UJIIndoorLoc dataset collected at Jaume I University (UJI) campus, Spain.

Highlights

IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
We show that the proposed DLB models significantly outperform the space estimation resulting from the point estimation models
The advent of deep learning has resulted in increasing interest in transfering its success to indoor localization [14,15,16,17,18]

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Driven by the wide adoption of smart devices, location-based services (LBS) are continuously gaining importance in our everyday lives. The user’s location can be determined by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) that offer reliable and accurate satellite position estimations. GNSSs do not sufficiently function inside buildings, since the signals are attenuated and scattered by building components. The potential usage of LBS within closed environments is estimated as high, the absence of a fully mature technological solution has restrained the growth of indoor LBS [1]. There is an increased demand in developing alternative localization systems that can be applied indoors

Results

Discussion

Conclusion