Pedestrian positioning using WiFi fingerprints and a foot-mounted inertial sensor

Foot-mounted inertial positioning (FMIP) and fingerprinting based WiFi indoor positioning (FWIP) are two promising solutions for indoor positioning. However, FMIP suffers from accumulative positioning errors in the long term while FWIP involves a very labor-intensive offline training phase. A new approach combining the two solutions is proposed in this paper, which can limit the error growth in FMIP and is free of any offline site survey phase. This approach is realized in the framework of a particle filter, where each particle denotes a potential trajectory of the user and is weighted according to its consistency in signal strength space. Compared with the traditional Gaussian process based approaches, the proposed one has less computational cost and is free from any prior information in the position domain, such as the positions of access points, received signal strengths at certain positions and so on. An experiment is carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach compared to the traditional Gaussian process based approach.