Automatic Fingerprint Data Labeling Using WiFi Signal and Smartphone Camera for Indoor Positioning

Abstract

WiFi fingerprinting has been one of the most practical approaches for implementing an indoor positioning system. However, the need to measure location labels for fingerprint data has hindered the deployment of WiFi fingerprint‐based positioning systems. To reduce the cost of location labeling, several methods for automatically labeling locations or bypassing location labeling have been proposed. However, these methods still need to measure location labels for partial fingerprint data, or the estimated location labels are inaccurate. In this paper, we propose Heimdall, an automatic fingerprint data labeling method using a smartphone camera and WiFi signal for an indoor positioning system. Since Heimdall utilizes camera geometry for accurate automatic labeling, it aims to find the location labels of unlabeled fingerprint data composed of WiFi received signal strengths (RSSs) and photos collected using smartphones in multiple reference points (RPs). Using structure from motion (SfM) with all photos in the unlabeled fingerprint dataset, the location and orientation of the cameras can be recovered on an arbitrary world coordinate system. However, the world coordinate system derived by SfM is warped. In other words, it is different from the real‐world coordinate system where we express the location labels since SfM has similarity ambiguity, including scale, rotation, and translation ambiguity. Heimdall finds the location labels by estimating and applying an unwarping transformation that removes those ambiguities. We use two types of geometric constraints for estimating the unwarping transformation. First, several geometric entities in the warped‐world coordinates and real‐world coordinates are extracted from the photos and prior information about the indoor layout. The unwarping transformation transforms the geometric entities in warped coordinates to those in real‐world coordinates. Second, we utilize the log‐distance pathloss model with RSSs to derive the constraint about distances from the location label to the access points. We construct the optimization problem subject to those constraints to estimate the unwarping transformation. To evaluate the performance of Heimdall, we performed several experiments. Heimdall yields a mean location labeling error of 0.12 m and a standard deviation of location labeling error of 0.06 m for the best case in the experiment. These results demonstrate that a fingerprint‐based indoor positioning system can use the location labels estimated by Heimdall without performance degradation.