Geographical and Fingerprinting Data for Positioning and Navigation Systems

Challenges, Experiences and Technology Roadmap

Jordi Conesa, Antoni Pérez-Navarro, Joaquin Torres-Sospedra, Raul Montoliu

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128131909
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automation in Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Geographical and Fingerprinting Data for Positioning and Navigation Systems: Challenges, Experiences and Technology Roadmap explores the state-of-the -art software tools and innovative strategies to provide better understanding of positioning and navigation in indoor environments using fingerprinting techniques. The book provides the different problems and challenges of indoor positioning and navigation services and shows how fingerprinting can be used to address such necessities. This advanced publication provides the useful references educational institutions, industry, academic researchers, professionals, developers and practitioners need to apply, evaluate and reproduce this book's contributions.

The readers will learn how to apply the necessary infrastructure to provide fingerprinting services and scalable environments to deal with fingerprint data.

• Provides the current state of fingerprinting for indoor positioning and navigation, along with its challenges and achievements
• Presents solutions for using WIFI signals to position and navigate in indoor environments
• Covers solutions for using the magnetic field to position and navigate in indoor environments
• Contains solutions of a modular positioning system as a solution for seamless positioning
• Analyzes geographical and fingerprint data in order to provide indoor/outdoor location and navigation systems

1

Challenges of Fingerprinting in Indoor Positioning and Navigation

Antoni Pérez-Navarro*^,†; Joaquín Torres-Sospedra^‡; Raul Montoliu^‡; Jordi Conesa*; Rafael Berkvens^§; Giuseppe Caso^¶; Constantinos Costa^||; Nicola Dorigatti**; Noelia Hernández^††; Stefan Knauth^‡‡; Elena Simona Lohan^§§; Juraj Machaj^¶¶; Adriano Moreira^||; Pawel Wilk*** ^* Faculty of Computer Sciences, Multimedia and Telecommunication at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Barcelona, Spain
^† Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Castelldefels, Spain
^‡ Institute of New Imaging Technologies, Jaume I University, Castellón, Spain
^§ Faculty of Applied Engineering, University of Antwerp—IMEC IDLab, Antwerp, Belgium
^¶ Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET), Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
^|| Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
^** Trilogis srl, Rovereto, Italy
^†† Intelligent Vehicles and Traffic Technologies Group, University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain
^‡‡ HFT Stuttgart, University of Applied Sciences, Stuttgart, Germany
^§§ Laboratory of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland
^¶¶ Department of Multimedia and Information-Communication Technologies, University of Zilina, žilina, Slovakia
^|| Algoritmi Research Center, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal
^*** Samsung R&D Poland, Warszawa, Poland

Abstract

The symposium “Challenges of Fingerprinting in Indoor Positioning and Navigation” took place at Barcelona (Spain) on May 3rd and 4th, 2016. The audience comprised academic, scientists, engineers, company representatives, and institutional members. The program offered reports on the state of the art for indoor positioning based on fingerprinting, as well as discussions of challenges of the technology for the near future. Discussions gave potential users of indoor positioning technology the opportunity to expose real indoor location problems that need to be solved. This chapter gives a summary of the topics dealt in the symposium and constitutes a brief introduction to the chapters that appear in the entire book.

Keywords

Indoor; Indoor positioning; Fingerprinting; Wi-Fi; Magnetic field; GNSS; BLE; RFID; UWB

1 Motivation

Since the beginning of humanity, localization and positioning have been a worry of human beings. This has driven to the creation and search of many different mechanisms to localize: the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the magnetic field, radio beacons, etc. And this information has been represented in several kind of maps.

Everything changed with the apparition of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in the 1960s that drove to the apparition of the American Global Positioning System (GPS) in 1995, and later to the Russian GLONASS, in 1996 or, more recently, to the European Galileo and the Chinese Beidou. GNSS systems have two important roles: (1) allow to get position with centimeter precision and, in some cases, even milliliter precision¹ ; and (2) allow to get that precision to anyone who owns the appropriate device, whatever his or her knowledge in positioning would be.

Although GNSS were born with military objectives, by the end of the 1990s receivers of GNSS became commercially available and very popular. By then, military restrictions did not allow high accuracy (more than 10 m), but this restriction disappeared in the 2000s and thus, people became used to have high accuracy localization and navigation.

The next step came with the inclusion of GNSS receivers in smartphones and its popularization which has driven most of people (78% in Europe) to wear a GNSS receiver. This situation has driven to an explosion of location-based systems (LBS). According to a Mobile Life study² 19% users use LBSs and 62% think of use LBSs. Navigation is the most popular.

One special kind of applications, Context Aware Recommender Systems have become many popular in marketing and, for example, FourSquare allows users to obtain different offers and discounts. In the social area, applications such as Google Now send users recommendations of events. There are also projects of tracking of patients such as Ekahau³; projects to include systems that automatically call emergencies in case of an accident (eCall⁴ ); projects that provide virtual information over reality (Ingress⁵ ); or the project Fieldtripglass to add augmented reality to what the user is seeing.⁶

All these LBS need for a reliable and real-time localization, which in most of these systems is obtained via GNSS, although a first localization is performed by using other signals such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or GSM and, once GNSS is available, the high precision position is obtained (Laitinen, 2017).

Despite the successes achieved, the problem of GNSS is that they are affected by Non-Line-Of-Sight problem, multipath propagation issues, signal blockage, intentional and unintentional interferences, etc. (Bhuiyan, 2011). This drives to a signal attenuation that fails to get position in urban canons or indoor environments. Thus, all those LBS fail when going indoors.

Then, the question that arises is: Is indoor positioning and navigation important? This is important, since people spend 80% of their time indoors (Wadden and Scheff, 1983), and, according to Gartner, in 2020 indoor revenues will be as high as 10 billion dollars. Thus, it can be seen that indoor environment has an important social and economic relevance.

The chapter is structured as follows: first, a brief review of indoor positioning systems is performed; then we focus on fingerprinting techniques and show some examples; in the following sections, the problems of indoor maps and privacy and security are presented; and finally, the chapter ends with the conclusions and future challenges.

2 Indoor Positioning Systems

Nowadays, there are still no universal standards for indoor positioning, similarly with what we can find outdoors with GNSS (Lymberopoulos et al., 2015). However, there are several techniques and methodologies that can solve the problem in some specific situations. In this section we will show some generic aspects of indoor positioning systems and which systems exist in the literature or on the market. However, first of all, some important concepts are defined in order to make the chapter (and the book) more understandable.

2.1 Position, Location, and Navigation

The first point to take into account is the difference between three key concepts: position, location, and navigation.

The position corresponds to the coordinates of a specific point in a coordinate system, such as the GPS latitude-longitude-altitude coordinates.

The location gives the position, but in the context of the specific point, for example: “you are situated in front of H&M shop at third floor of the Mega mall.” Location is what gives position its meaning to the user. Location can be given for static elements or for dynamic elements. Although location of dynamic elements might appear like locate the same element several times, the reality is that techniques applied for both types of location (static and dynamic) can be very different.

Finally, navigation refers to how one goes from point A to point B. There are two main constraints: (1) there are some rules for going to one point to the other (such as speed limit, or staying in a track); and (2)...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedicatories
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Challenges of Fingerprinting in Indoor Positioning and Navigation
• 2: Wi-Fi Tracking Threatens Users’ Privacy in Fingerprinting Techniques
• 3: Lessons Learned in Generating Ground Truth for Indoor Positioning Systems Based on Wi-Fi Fingerprinting
• 4: Radio Maps for Fingerprinting in Indoor Positioning
• 5: Crowdsourced Indoor Mapping
• 6: Radio Fingerprinting-Based Indoor Localization: Overcoming Practical Challenges
• 7: Low-Complexity Offline and Online Strategies for Wi-Fi Fingerprinting Indoor Positioning Systems
• 8: Study and Evaluation of Selected RSSI-Based Positioning Algorithms
• 9: Mapping Indoor Environments: Challenges Related to the Cartographic Representation and Routes
• 10: OGC IndoorGML: A Standard Approach for Indoor Maps
• 11: The EvAAL Evaluation Framework and the IPIN Competitions
• 12: IndoorLoc Platform: A Web Tool to Support the Comparison of Indoor Positioning Systems
• 13: Challenges and Solutions in Received Signal Strength-Based Seamless Positioning
• 14: Deployment of a Passive Localization System for Occupancy Services in a Lecture Building
• 15: Remote Monitoring for Safety of Workers in Industrial Plants: Learned Lessons Beyond Technical Issues
• 16: A Review of Indoor Localization Methods Based on Inertial Sensors
• 17: Fundamentals of Airborne Acoustic Positioning Systems
• 18: Indoor Positioning System Based on PSD Sensor
• Index