Synthesis of a Small Fingerprint Database through a Deep Generative Model for Indoor Localisation

Abstract

In deep learning (DL), the deep generative model is helpful for data augmentation objectives to tackle the lack of datasets that have a significant impact on learning performance. Data augmentation or synthesis is expected to solve the issue in a small/sparse database. The problem of databasing also exists in the fingerprint-based indoor localisation system. The dense offline fingerprint database must be constructed with the accuracy requirement. However, this will affect the high cost, massive laborious work, and increase the complexity of the system. Therefore, this paper proposes to address these issues by generating synthetic data via a deep generative model. The generative adversarial network (GAN) is selected to generate the synthetic fingerprint database for indoor localisation. Our database consideration consists of power-based parameters, i.e., the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) from Wi-Fi devices obtained from the actual measurement campaign. Some of the literature mainly discusses how GAN works in a vast and complex dataset. Here, we consider applying GAN in a relatively small dataset and for a simple setup. Our results show that by only using the 20 % fraction of actual RSSI data combined with the synthetic RSSI, the accuracy validation performance is slightly higher than when using all actual data usage. Moreover, in only 60 % of actual data usage and in combination with 625 samples of synthetic data, the accuracy performance is improved to 0.73 (1.37 times higher than the use of all actual data, 0.53). Thus, this result proves that the challenges of offline fingerprint databases can be alleviated by data synthesis through GAN by using only a small dataset.