Montage: Combine Frames with Movement Continuity for Realtime Multi-User Tracking

Abstract

In this work, we design and develop Montage for real-time multi-user formation tracking and localization by off-the-shelf smartphones. Montage achieves submeter-level tracking accuracy by integrating temporal and spatial constraints from user movement vectorestimation and distance measuring. In Montage, we designed a suite of novel techniques to surmount a variety of challenges in real-time tracking, without infrastructure and fingerprints, and without any a priori user-specific (e.g., stride-length and phoneplacement) or site-specific (e.g., digitalized map) knowledge: (1) a coded audio tone to support multi-user tracking with minimal latency, in the presence of high noise, multi-path effect, and Doppler Shift, (2) an innovative stride-length and walking direction estimation method without a priori knowledge of user and site, and (3) a vector-based multi-user tracking scheme which connects successive localization snapshots to refine users' locations and generate continuous moving traces. We implemented, deployed, and evaluated Montage in both outdoor and indoor environment. Our experimental results (847 traces from 15 users) show that the stride-length estimated by Montage over all users has error within 9cm, and the moving-direction estimated by Montage is within 20 degrees. For real-time tracking, Montage provides meter-second-level formation tracking accuracy with off-the-shelf mobile phones.