Indoor PDR Positioning Assisted by Acoustic Source Localization, and Pedestrian Movement Behavior Recognition, Using a Dual-Microphone Smartphone

Abstract

In recent years, the public’s demand for location services has increased significantly. As outdoor positioning has matured, indoor positioning has become a focus area for researchers. Various indoor positioning methods have emerged. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) has become a research hotspot since it does not require a positioning infrastructure. An integral equation is used in PDR positioning; thus, errors accumulate during long-term operation. To eliminate the accumulated errors in PDR localisation, this paper proposes a PDR localisation system applied to complex scenarios with multiple buildings and large areas. The system is based on the pedestrian movement behavior recognition algorithm proposed in this paper, which recognises the behavior of pedestrians for each gait and improves the stride length estimation for PDR localisation based on the recognition results to reduce the accumulation of errors in the PDR localisation algorithm itself. At the same time, the system uses self-researched hardware to modify the audio equipment used for broadcasting within the indoor environment, to locate the acoustic source through a Hamming distance-based localisation algorithm, and to correct the estimated acoustic source estimated location based on the known source location in order to eliminate the accumulated error in PDR localisation. Through analysis and experimental verification, the recognition accuracy of pedestrian movement behavior recognition proposed in this paper reaches 95% and the acoustic source localisation accuracy of 0.32 m during movement, thus, producing an excellent effect on eliminating the cumulative error of PDR localisation.