Indoor positioning using deep-learning-based pedestrian dead reckoning and optical camera communication

Abstract

The need for an accurate indoor positioning system has rapidly increased with the development of large complex malls and underground spaces. As signals from the global positioning system cannot be received inside buildings, only approximate locations can be estimated using Wi-Fi routers or cellular base station information, and exact locations cannot be determined. Therefore, a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) scheme using several sensors is suggested in this work. However, this scheme requires users to hold their smartphones in a specific manner; furthermore, user-dependent parameters, such as height and step length, are necessary because the sensor parameters vary. This study uses deep-learning algorithms to overcome the limitations of the existing smartphone-based PDR scheme. A convolutional neural network algorithm is used to classify the smartphone positions; then, appropriate sensor data are selected and adjusted. The long short-term memory algorithm is used to estimate the user step length. Although the PDR performance is enhanced using the deep-learning algorithm, accumulated error is unavoidable because the algorithm traces the relative position with reference to the original location. Therefore, optical camera communication is introduced to provide the reference location and periodically compensate for the accumulated PDR error. The proposed algorithm is experimentally demonstrated, and its results are obtained and analyzed.