On-the-fly calibration of low-cost gas sensors

Abstract

Air quality monitoring is extremely important as air pollution has a direct impact on human health. Low-cost gas sensors are used to effectively perceive the environment by mounting them on top of mobile vehicles, for example, using a public transport network. Thus, these sensors are part of a mobile network and perform from time to time measurements in each others vicinity. In this paper, we study three calibration algorithms that exploit co-located sensor measurements to enhance sensor calibration and consequently the quality of the pollution measurements on-the-fly. Forward calibration, based on a traditional approach widely used in the literature, is used as performance benchmark for two novel algorithms: backward and instant calibration. We validate all three algorithms with real ozone pollution measurements carried out in an urban setting by comparing gas sensor output to high-quality measurements from analytical instruments. We find that both backward and instant calibration reduce the average measurement error by a factor of two compared to forward calibration. Furthermore, we unveil the arising difficulties if sensor calibration is not based on reliable reference measurements but on sensor readings of low-cost gas sensors which is inevitable in a mobile scenario with only a few reliable sensors. We propose a solution and evaluate its effect on the measurement accuracy in experiments and simulation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.