Improving Wi-Fi Fingerprint Positioning with a Pose Recognition-Assisted SVM Algorithm

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The fingerprint method has been widely adopted for Wi-Fi indoor positioning. In the fingerprint matching process, user poses and user body shadowing have serious impact on the received signal strength (RSS) data and degrade matching accuracy; however, this impact has not attracted large attention. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of user poses and user body shadowing on the collected RSS data and propose a new method called the pose recognition-assisted support vector machine algorithm (PRASVM). It fully exploits the characteristics of different user poses and improves the support vector machine (SVM) positioning performance by introducing a pose recognition procedure. This proposed method firstly establishes a fingerprint database with RSS and sensor data corresponding to different poses in the offline phase, and fingerprints of different poses in the database are extracted to train reference point (RP) classifiers of different poses and a pose classifier using an SVM algorithm. Secondly, in the online phase, the poses of RSS data measured online are recognised by a pose classifier, and RSS data measured online are grouped with different poses. Then online RSS data from each group at an unknown user location are reclassified as corresponding RPs by the RP classifiers of the corresponding poses. Finally, user location is determined by grouped RSS data corresponding to coordinates of the RPs. By considering the user pose and user body shadowing, the observed RSS data matches the fingerprint database better, and the classification accuracy of grouped online RSS data is remarkably improved. To verify performances of the proposed method, experiments are carried out: one in an office setting, and the other in a lecture hall. The experimental results show that the positioning accuracies of the proposed PRASVM algorithm outperform the conventional weighted k-nearest neighbour (WKNN) algorithm by 52.29% and 40.89%, outperform the SVM algorithm by 73.74% and 60.45%, and outperform the pose recognition-assisted WKNN algorithm by 34.76% and 21.86%, respectively. As a result, the PRASVM algorithm noticeably improves positioning accuracy.