A robust TDoA-based localization and tracking method designed for intelligent recommender systems

In today's fast-paced society, the demand for intelligent Recommender Systems(RS) is increasing day by day. Users may hope that RSs can take their real-time situation into consideration to help them make timely decisions. To fulfill this goal, RSs need to accurately understand users' information, especially their real-time location. Therefore, localization of the users is very helpful in building an intelligent RS. Meanwhile, great efforts have been made to deal with localization based on time-difference-of-arrival (TDoA) measurements in the past decades. It is widely used in applications such as radar, sonar, sensor networks, and mobile communications. However, such a task is still challenging in complex real-world scenarios where large-scale noise and none-light-of-sight (NLoS) occur. To address this challenge, we propose a noise-tolerant method consisting of two stages: the Robust Multilateration Solver (RMS) and the Restricted Particle Filter (RPF). In the first stage, anomaly detection is adopted to eliminate outliers, and NLoS effects are mitigated by a data augmentation strategy. Then a rough estimate of the current position is obtained by combining two modified multilateration algorithms. In the second stage, the rough estimate is passed through an enhanced particle filter in order to reduce its bias caused by heavy Gaussian noise and smooth the motion trajectory. Meanwhile, localization rationality is guaranteed by confining the position to a predefined area. Sufficient testing in real indoor environments and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and reveal its fitness for various industrial fields.