Improving Room-Level Location for Indoor Trajectory Tracking with Low IPS Accuracy

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With the development of indoor positioning methods, such as Wi-Fi positioning, geomagnetic sensor positioning, Ultra-Wideband positioning, and pedestrian dead reckoning, the area of location-based services (LBS) is expanding from outdoor to indoor spaces. LBS refers to the geographic location information of moving objects to provide the desired services. Most Wi-Fi-based indoor positioning methods provide two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) coordinates in 1–5 m of accuracy on average approximately. However, many applications of indoor LBS are targeted to specific spaces such as rooms, corridors, stairs, etc. Thus, they require determining a service space from a coordinate in indoor spaces. In this paper, we propose a map matching method to assign an indoor position to a unit space a subdivision of an indoor space, called USMM (Unit Space Map Matching). Map matching is a commonly used localization improvement method that utilizes spatial constraints. We consider the topological information between unit spaces and moving objects’ probabilistic properties, compared to existing room-level mappings based on sensor signals, especially received signal strength-based fingerprinting. The proposed method has the advantage of calculating the probability even if there is only one input trajectory. Last, we analyze the accuracy and performance of the proposed USMM methods by extensive experiments in real and synthetic environments. The experimental results show that our methods bring a significant improvement when the accuracy level of indoor positioning is low. In experiments, the room-level location accuracy improves by almost 30% and 23% with real and synthetic data, respectively. We conclude that USMM methods are helpful to correct valid room-level locations from given positioning locations.