Robust and Accurate Smartphone-Based Step Counting for Indoor Localization

Abstract

Robust and accurate step counting is important for indoor localization algorithms that rely on smartphone inertial sensors. Existing solutions for step counting do not consider users’ false walking state (e.g., when a user in still state uses her phone for texting, playing games, and watching movies), which results in the over-counting problem. In this paper, we propose a robust and accurate step counting algorithm to solve the overcounting problem caused by false walking. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the commonly-used peak detection-based method and can improve the step counting accuracy by 6.56% for normal walking case, 9.54% for free walking case, and by 58.92% for false walking case, which is a significant improvement in the accuracy and robustness. We also compare the proposed method with popular commercial step counting applications including S Health, i-Health, and Pedometer++, which shows that our method can achieve better accuracy.