A Directional Particle Filter-Based Multi-Floor Indoor Positioning System

Abstract

In recent years, extensive research and applications have demonstrated that a more accurate and stable indoor positioning system (IPS) can be realized through the complementarity of different technologies. However, improving the accuracy of a single positioning technology would significantly impact the subsequent fusion. In this paper, we proposed a smartphone positioning system based on pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) fusing with a floor estimation module (FEM) and a directional particle filter (PF) extracted by the idea of a regular PF to improve positioning accuracy. Generally, particles are generated by circle-shaped distribution by a regular PF, leading to producing some useless particles that waste computing resources. To tackle this issue, our proposed directional PF uses the particle more effectively by adjusting the distribution shape of particles with an estimated moving direction. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to verify the positioning accuracy and robustness of the proposed method. The experimental data show that the positioning error of our proposed method is only 1.53 m in a multi-floor path with a total length of 306 m.

Keywords

• Directional particle filtering
• indoor positioning system
• pedestrian dead reckoning
• smartphone-based