WiFi Fingerprint-based Indoor Localization Research Articles

HyTra: Hyperclass Transformer for WiFi Fingerprinting-based Indoor Localization

The emerging demand for a variety of novel Location-based Services (LBS) by consumers and industrial users is driven by the rapid and extensive proliferation of mobile smart devices. Sensors embedded in smart devices or machines provide wireless connectivity and Global Positioning System (GPS) capability, and are co-utilized to acquire location-linked data which are algorithmically transformed into reliable and accurate location estimates. GPS is a mature and reliable technology for outdoor localization but indoor localization in a complex multi-storey building environment remains challenging due to fluctuations in wireless signal strength arising from multipath fading. Location-linked data from wireless access points (WAPs) such as received signal strength (RSS) are acquired as numerical sequences. By conceptualizing a fixed order sequence of WAP measurements as a sentence where the RSS from each WAP are words, we may leverage on recent advances in artificial intelligence for natural language processing (NLP) to enhance localization accuracy and improve robustness against signal fluctuations. We propose the hyper-class Transformer (HyTra), an encoder-only Transformer neural network which learns the relative positions of wireless access points (WAPs) through multiple learnable embeddings. We propose a second network, HyTra-HF, which improves upon HyTra by applying a hierarchical relationship between location classes. We test our proposed networks on public and private datasets varying in sizes. HyTra-HF outperforms existing deep learning solutions by obtaining 96.7\% accuracy for the floor classification task on the UJIIndoorloc dataset. HyTra-HF is amenable to deep model compression and achieves accuracy of 95.95\% with over ten-fold reduction in model size using Sparsity Aware Orthogonal (SAO) initialization and has the best-in-class accuracy for the sparse model.

GConvLoc: WiFi Fingerprinting-Based Indoor Localization Using Graph Convolutional Networks

We propose GConvLoc, a WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization method utilizing graph convolutional networks. Using the graph structure, we can consider the fingerprint data of the reference points and their location labels in addition to the fingerprint data of the test point at inference time. Experimental results show that GConvLoc outperforms baseline methods that do not utilize graphs.

Laser Range Scanners for Enabling Zero-overhead WiFi-based Indoor Localization System

Robust and accurate indoor localization has been the goal of several research efforts over the past decade. Toward achieving this goal, WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization systems have been proposed. However, fingerprinting involves significant effort—especially when done at high density—and needs to be repeated with any change in the deployment area. While a number of recent systems have been introduced to reduce the calibration effort, these still trade overhead with accuracy. This article presents LiPhi++ , an accurate system for enabling fingerprinting-based indoor localization systems without the associated data collection overhead. This is achieved by leveraging the sensing capability of transportable laser range scanners to automatically label WiFi scans, which can subsequently be used to build (and maintain) a fingerprint database. As part of its design, LiPhi++ leverages this database to train a deep long short-term memory network utilizing the signal strength history from the detected access points. LiPhi++ also has provisions for handling practical deployment issues, including the noisy wireless environment, heterogeneous devices, among others. Evaluation of LiPhi++ using Android phones in two realistic testbeds shows that it can match the performance of manual fingerprinting techniques under the same deployment conditions without the overhead associated with the traditional fingerprinting process. In addition, LiPhi++ improves upon the median localization accuracy obtained from crowdsourcing-based and fingerprinting-based systems by 284% and 418%, respectively, when tested with data collected a few months later.

MRILoc: Multiresolution Indoor Localization from crowdsourced samples

The demand of Wi-Fi fingerprinting-based indoor localization has been growing steadily for its open-source and low-cost infrastructure. Since site survey is tedious and costly, crowdsourcing is becoming a typical practice for fingerprint database construction. However, erroneous location annotation and non-uniform sample density need to be addressed in sample crowdsourcing. Furthermore, the traditional massive fingerprint databases in large and complex indoor environments require longer processing time and extensive computational complexity, limiting their efficiency and scalability. We propose a Multiresolution Indoor Localization from crowdsourced samples (MRILoc) system to address these challenges. The MRILoc consists of three major offline modules and a new online hierarchical and multiresolution localization algorithm. Firstly, we designe a Sample Reliability Measure Algorithm (SRMA) to identify reliable crowdsourced samples. Secondly, we construct weighted surfaces using reliable fingerprints and downsample fingerprints at the center of grids to resolve the issue of the non-uniform sample density. Thirdly, we construct hierarchical training databases for multiresolution localization. Our online algorithm integrates the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) to classify a test sample in different resolution subareas and uses XGBoost regression for the final exact localization approximation if necessary. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on two field measurement datasets. The experiment results show a high average hitting rate and 19% localization accuracy improvement over the peer schemes.

Indoor Localization With Wireless Heterogeneous Devices by Composite Fingerprint Sets and Hybrid Classification

Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor localization has recently attracted significant research interest since Wi-Fi devices are widely deployed and practical, and no additional infrastructure is required. However, the Received Signal Strength (RSS) is significantly different on heterogeneous devices, and this difference has a negative impact on localization results. In this paper, we propose a multi-fingerprint and multi-classifier fusion (MFMCF) localization method to improve the localization accuracy and solve the problem of heterogeneous hardware. First, the individual feature set of original RSS fingerprint, signal strength difference (SSD) fingerprint and hyperbolic location fingerprint (HLF) are fused as a composite fingerprint set (CFS), and then the data dimension is reduced by linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Second, three representative machine learning algorithms including K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) are selected and trained to construct an integrated fusion model. Finally, in order to get more accurate predictions, in the online phase, a selective strategy based on entropy is proposed by calculating the entropy of each classifier’s prediction result. Experiments show that MFMCF is an effective scheme to solve the localization problem of heterogeneous devices and improve the localization accuracy.

Wi-Fi Fingerprint-Based Indoor Localization Method via Standard Particle Swarm Optimization.

With the continuous development and improvement in Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, indoor localization has received considerable attention. Particularly, owing to its unique advantages, the Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor-localization method has been widely investigated. However, achieving high-accuracy localization remains a challenge. This study proposes an application of the standard particle swarm optimization algorithm to Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor localization, wherein a new two-panel fingerprint homogeneity model is adopted to characterize fingerprint similarity to achieve better performance. In addition, the performance of the localization method is experimentally verified. The proposed localization method outperforms conventional algorithms, with improvements in the localization accuracy of 15.32%, 15.91%, 32.38%, and 36.64%, compared to those of KNN, SVM, LR, and RF, respectively.

Fingerprint Augment Based on Super-Resolution for WiFi Fingerprint Based Indoor Localization

WiFi fingerprint based indoor localization has become a key research direction in the field of indoor localization due to its high positioning accuracy and low equipment deployment cost. Increasing the number of reference point collected offline can improve the positioning accuracy, however it yields excessive cost of offline collection. Fingerprint augment is an effective solution to reduce the cost while ensuring the positioning accuracy. In this paper, we are pioneering to propose a fingerprint augment framework based on super-resolution (FASR), which achieves the fusion of fingerprint augment and super-resolution based on mutual conversion between fingerprint data and fingerprint image. The processing framework of FASR is formulated and the implementation of three modules in FASR are given, including Fingerprint-To-Image Conversion module, Super-Resolution module and Image-To-Fingerprint Conversion module. Simulated and real data experiments reveal the feasibility and effectiveness of the FASR. In addition, we explore the impact of two key engineering parameters on the performance of the FASR method. Our work demonstrates the new application of super-resolution in image processing field in wireless indoor localization topics.

Robustifying Wi-Fi Localization by Between-Location Data Augmentation

Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor localization is one of the most practical localization methods, which does not require extra infrastructure and special hardware. However, we need to acquire a dataset with a high-density dataset in the target environment in this framework. To overcome the data acquisition cost problem, we propose a brand new data augmentation for Wi-Fi indoor localization named Between-Location data augmentation (BL data augmentation). We generate the fingerprint data for the whole target environment with high density by only using the sparsely sampled data. Between-Class learning, which is the origin of BL data augmentation and the latest powerful data augmentation method for sound recognition and image processing, mixes two data linearly with normalization; however, this mixing does not make sense in indoor localization because mixed fingerprint has no meaning and the label of indoor localization is not categorical information but physically correlated information. To overcome these two problems, we propose the generative model based on neural networks installed the physical relationship of labels and Wi-Fi fingerprint property. BL data augmentation enables us to reduce data sampled locations while keeping the localization accuracy even if some target locations have no data. From the experimental results, indoor localization methods with BL data augmentation outperform the state-of-the-art data augmentation method on several indoor localization models, whatever the data collection location is dense or sparse. Moreover, the localization with BL data augmentation using 10 % sampled location achieves the same accuracy with localization without data augmentation using all sampled locations.

CHISEL: Compression-Aware High-Accuracy Embedded Indoor Localization With Deep Learning

GPS technology has revolutionized the way we localize and navigate outdoors. However, the poor reception of GPS signals in buildings makes it unsuitable for indoor localization. WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization is one of the most promising ways to meet this demand. Unfortunately, most work in the domain fails to resolve challenges associated with deployability on resource-limited embedded devices. In this work, we propose a compression-aware and high-accuracy deep learning framework called CHISEL that outperforms the best-known works in the area while maintaining localization robustness on embedded devices.

Supervised and semi-supervised deep probabilistic models for indoor positioning problems

WiFi fingerprint-based indoor localization has been a popular research topic recently. In this work, we propose two novel deep learning-based models, the convolutional mixture density recurrent neural network and the variational autoencoder-based semi-supervised learning model. The convolutional mixture density recurrent neural network is designed for indoor next location prediction, in which the advantages of convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks and mixture density networks are combined. Furthermore, since most of real-world WiFi fingerprint data are not labeled, we devise a variational autoencoder-based model to compute accurate user location in a semi-supervised learning manner. Finally, in order to evaluate the proposed models, we conduct the validation experiments on two real-world datasets. The final results are compared to other existing methods and verify the effectiveness of our approaches.

Preserving Privacy in WiFi Localization With Plausible Dummy Locations

Benefiting from the development of wireless communication, WiFi localization plays a vital role in various mobile applications. However, users’ locations are breached by untrusted localization servers, thus disclosing users’ location privacy and other sensitive personal information. Existing works on WiFi localization preservation employed homomorphic encryption, which incurs extremely high overheads. On the other hand, lightweight methods like $k$ -anonymity and dummy-based approaches are hardly used for privacy preservation in WiFi localization scenarios due to their inherent drawbacks, i.e., $k$ -anonymity approaches rely on trusted third parties while dummy-based approaches are susceptible to spatio-temporal correlation attacks. To design an effective yet lightweight WiFi localization privacy algorithm, this paper proposes to reinforce dummy techniques with plausible dummy location to resist the attacks. This study presents a novel algorithm, referred to as Location Preservation Algorithm with Plausible Dummies (LPPD), which is the first attempt towards WiFi localization privacy preservation using dummy techniques. The benefits of the algorithm are three-fold: First, it is lightweight. Second, it does not rely on trusted third parties. Third, it can resist spatio-temporal correlation attacks. Moreover, this study implements a WiFi localization system that integrates the proposed privacy-preserving algorithm with a WiFi fingerprint based indoor localization algorithm. Experiments results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach when compared with existing algorithms.

Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Scheme in Wi-Fi Fingerprint-Based Indoor Localization

Wi-Fi fingerprint-based localization, a common indoor localization technique, plays an important role in the Internet of Things, supporting a number of mobile applications, e.g., navigation indoor, trackingetc. However, Wi-Fi fingerprint-based localization suffers from the privacy issue, disclosing users’ location privacy and the data privacy of localization server (LS). Existing work cannot completely protect LS's data privacy, and moreover, incurs larger amount of computation and communication overhead. In this article, we propose a lightweight privacy-preserving scheme (LWP $^{2}$ ) which protects both location privacy and data privacy with lower cost. The main idea of LWP $^{2}$ is to first formalize the privacy-preserving localization problem as minimizing the least-squared-error for an overdetermined linear formulation, and then design a lightweight solution in ciphertext space using the special structure of the overdetermined linear formulation. Extensive experiments have validated the privacy preservation and the efficiency improvement of LWP $^{2}$ .

A Novel Access Point Placement Method for WiFi Fingerprinting Considering Existing APs

To achieve the satisfactory performance of WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization, additional access point (AP) deployment is usually required in some environments. How to place these additional APs is a problem. The current AP placement methods do not consider the existing APs. In this letter, we propose a novel AP placement method for WiFi fingerprinting that considers existing APs. The parameters of the radio propagation model are first obtained based on data collected from the existing APs. Then, based on the self-learning parameters, we perform a genetic algorithm (GA)-based optimization method for AP placement. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Two-Level WiFi Fingerprint-Based Indoor Localization Method for Dangerous Area Monitoring.

Localization technologies play an important role in disaster management and emergence response. In areas where the environment does not change much after an accident or in the case of dangerous areas monitoring, indoor fingerprint-based localization can be used. In such scenarios, a positioning system needs to have both a high accuracy and a rapid response. However, these two requirements are usually conflicting since a fingerprint-based indoor localization system with high accuracy usually has complex algorithms and needs to process a large amount of data, and therefore has a slow response. This problem becomes even worse when both the size of monitoring area and the number of reference nodes increase. To address this challenging problem, this paper proposes a two-level positioning algorithm in order to improve both the accuracy and the response time. In the off-line stage, a fingerprint database is divided into several sub databases by using an affinity propagation clustering (APC) algorithm based on Shepard similarity. The online stage has two steps: (1) a coarse positioning algorithm is adopted to find the most similar sub database by matching the cluster center with the fingerprint of the node tested, which will narrow the search space and consequently save time; (2) in the sub database area, a support vector regression (SVR) algorithm with its parameters being optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used for fine positioning, thus improving the online positioning accuracy. Both experiment results and actual implementations proved that the proposed two-level localization method is more suitable than other methods in term of algorithm complexity, storage requirements and localization accuracy in dangerous area monitoring.

Wi-Fi Fingerprinting Based Room Level Indoor Localization Framework Using Ensemble Classifiers

Over the past decennium, Wi-Fi fingerprinting based indoor localization has seized substantial attention. Room level indoor localization can enable numerous applications to increase their diversity by incorporating user location. Real-world commercial scale deployments have not been realized because of difficulty in capturing radio propagation models. In case of fingerprinting based approaches, radio propagation model is implicitly integrated in the gathered fingerprints providing more realistic information as compared to empirical propagation models. We propose ensemble classifiers based indoor localization using Wi-Fi fingerprints for room level prediction. The major advantages of the proposed framework are, ease of training, ease to set up framework providing high room-level accuracy with trifling response time making it viable and appropriate for real time applications. It performs well in comparison with recurrently used ANN (Artificial Neural Network) and kNN (k-Nearest Neighbours) based solutions. Experiments performed showed that on our real-world Wi-Fi fingerprint dataset, our proposed approach achieved 89% accuracy whereas neural network and kNN based best found configurations achieved 85 and 82% accuracy respectively.

SDR-Fi: Deep-Learning-Based Indoor Positioning via Software-Defined Radio

Wi-Fi fingerprinting-based indoor localization has received increased attention due to its proven accuracy and global availability. The common received-signal-strength-based (RSS) fingerprinting presents performance degradation due to well-known signal fluctuations, but more recently, the more stable channel state information (CSI) has gained popularity. In this paper, we present SDR-Fi, the first reported Wi-Fi software-defined radio (SDR) receiver for indoor positioning using CSI measurements as features for deep learning (DL) classification. The CSI measurements are obtained from a fast-prototyping LabVIEW-based 802.11n SDR receiver platform. SDR-Fi measures CSI data passively from pilot beacon frames from a single access point (AP) at almost 10 Hz rate. A feed-forward neural network and a 1D convolutional neural network are examined to estimate location accuracy in representative testing scenarios for an indoor cluttered laboratory area, and an adjacent, covered outdoor area. The proposed DL classification methods leverage CSI-based fingerprinting for low AP scenarios, as opposed to traditional RSS-based systems, which require many APs for reliable positioning. Demonstration results are threefold: (a) A fast-prototyping SDR platform that passively extracts CSI measurements from Wi-Fi beacon frames, providing a genuine possibility for vendor network cards to provide such measurements, (b) two state-of-the-art DL classification methods outperforming traditional RSS-based methods for low AP scenarios, (c) a testing methodology for performance evaluation of the proposed indoor positioning system.

DP3: A Differential Privacy-Based Privacy-Preserving Indoor Localization Mechanism

Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor localization is regarded as one of the most promising techniques for location-based services. However, it faces serious problem of privacy disclosure of both clients’ location data and provider’s fingerprint database. To address this issue, this letter proposes a differential privacy (DP)-based privacy-preserving indoor localization scheme, called DP3, which is composed of four phases: access point (AP) fuzzification and location retrieval in client side and DP-based finger clustering and finger permutation in server side. Specifically, in AP fuzzification , instead of providing the measured full finger (including AP sequence and the corresponding received signal strength), a to-be-localized (TBL) client only uploads the AP sequence to the server. Then, the localization server utilizes the DP-enabled clustering to build the fingerprints related to the AP sequence into $k$ clusters, permutes these reference points in each cluster with exponential mechanism to mask the real positions of these fingerprints, and sends the modified data set to the TBL client. At client side, location retrieval phase estimates the location of the client. Theoretical and experimental results show that DP3 can simultaneously protect the location privacy of the TBL client and the data privacy of the localization server.

Convex Optimization via Symmetrical Hölder Divergence for a WLAN Indoor Positioning System.

Modern indoor positioning system services are important technologies that play vital roles in modern life, providing many services such as recruiting emergency healthcare providers and for security purposes. Several large companies, such as Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, and Google, have researched location-based services. Wireless indoor localization is key for pervasive computing applications and network optimization. Different approaches have been developed for this technique using WiFi signals. WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization has been widely used due to its simplicity, and algorithms that fingerprint WiFi signals at separate locations can achieve accuracy within a few meters. However, a major drawback of WiFi fingerprinting is the variance in received signal strength (RSS), as it fluctuates with time and changing environment. As the signal changes, so does the fingerprint database, which can change the distribution of the RSS (multimodal distribution). Thus, in this paper, we propose that symmetrical Hölder divergence, which is a statistical model of entropy that encapsulates both the skew Bhattacharyya divergence and Cauchy–Schwarz divergence that are closed-form formulas that can be used to measure the statistical dissimilarities between the same exponential family for the signals that have multivariate distributions. The Hölder divergence is asymmetric, so we used both left-sided and right-sided data so the centroid can be symmetrized to obtain the minimizer of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results showed that the symmetrized Hölder divergence consistently outperformed the traditional k nearest neighbor and probability neural network. In addition, with the proposed algorithm, the position error accuracy was about 1 m in buildings.

Mitigating Large Errors in WiFi-Based Indoor Localization for Smartphones

Although WiFi fingerprint-based indoor localization is attractive, its accuracy remains a primary challenge, especially in mobile environments. Existing approaches either appeal to physical layer information or rely on extra wireless signals for high accuracy. In this paper, we revisit the received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint-based localization scheme and reveal crucial observations that act as the root causes of localization errors, yet are surprisingly overlooked or not adequately addressed in previous works. Specifically, we recognize access points’ (APs) diverse discrimination for fingerprinting a specific location, observe the RSS inconsistency caused by signal fluctuations and human body blockages, and uncover the transitional fingerprint problem on commodity smartphones. Inspired by these insights, we devise a discrimination factor to quantify different APs’ discrimination, incorporate robust regression to tolerate outlier measurements, and reassemble different normal fingerprints to cope with transitional fingerprints. Integrating these techniques in a unified system, we propose DorFin, i.e., a novel scheme of fingerprint generation, representation, and matching, which yields remarkable accuracy without incurring extra cost. Extensive experiments in three campus buildings demonstrate that DorFin achieves a mean error of 2.5 m and, more importantly, decreases the 95th percentile error under 6.2 m, both significantly outperforming existing approaches.

A Robust Crowdsourcing-Based Indoor Localization System.

WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization has been widely used due to its simplicity and can be implemented on the smartphones. The major drawback of WiFi fingerprinting is that the radio map construction is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. Another drawback of WiFi fingerprinting is the Received Signal Strength (RSS) variance problem, caused by environmental changes and device diversity. RSS variance severely degrades the localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose a robust crowdsourcing-based indoor localization system (RCILS). RCILS can automatically construct the radio map using crowdsourcing data collected by smartphones. RCILS abstracts the indoor map as the semantics graph in which the edges are the possible user paths and the vertexes are the location where users may take special activities. RCILS extracts the activity sequence contained in the trajectories by activity detection and pedestrian dead-reckoning. Based on the semantics graph and activity sequence, crowdsourcing trajectories can be located and a radio map is constructed based on the localization results. For the RSS variance problem, RCILS uses the trajectory fingerprint model for indoor localization. During online localization, RCILS obtains an RSS sequence and realizes localization by matching the RSS sequence with the radio map. To evaluate RCILS, we apply RCILS in an office building. Experiment results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of RCILS.