Data Cleansing for Indoor Positioning Wi-Fi Fingerprinting Datasets

Wearable and IoT devices requiring positioning and localisation services grow in number exponentially every year. This rapid growth also produces millions of data entries that need to be pre-processed prior to being used in any indoor positioning system to ensure the data quality and provide a high Quality of Service (QoS) to the end-user. In this paper, we offer a novel and straightforward data cleansing algorithm for WLAN fingerprinting radio maps. This algorithm is based on the correlation among fingerprints using the Received Signal Strength (RSS) values and the Access Points (APs)'s identifier. We use those to compute the correlation among all samples in the dataset and remove fingerprints with low level of correlation from the dataset. We evaluated the proposed method on 14 independent publicly-available datasets. As a result, an average of 14% of fingerprints were removed from the datasets. The 2D positioning error was reduced by 2.7% and 3D positioning error by 5.3% with a slight increase in the floor hit rate by 1.2% on average. Consequently, the average speed of position prediction was also increased by 14%.

Towards Accelerated Localization Performance Across Indoor Positioning Datasets

The localization speed and accuracy in the indoor scenario can greatly impact the Quality of Experience of the user. While many individual machine learning models can achieve comparable positioning performance, their prediction mechanisms offer different complexity to the system. In this work, we propose a fingerprinting positioning method for multi-building and multi-floor deployments, composed of a cascade of three models for building classification, floor classification, and 2D localization regression. We conduct an exhaustive search for the optimally performing one in each step of the cascade while validating on 14 different openly available datasets. As a result, we bring forward the best-performing combination of models in terms of overall positioning accuracy and processing speed and evaluate on independent sets of samples. We reduce the mean prediction time by 71% while achieving comparable positioning performance across all considered datasets. Moreover, in case of voluminous training dataset, the prediction time is reduced down to 1% of the benchmark's.

Towards Ubiquitous Indoor Positioning: Comparing Systems across Heterogeneous Datasets

The evaluation of Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) mostly relies on local deployments in the researchers' or partners' facilities. The complexity of preparing comprehensive experiments, collecting data, and considering multiple scenarios usually limits the evaluation area and, therefore, the assessment of the proposed systems. The requirements and features of controlled experiments cannot be generalized since the use of the same sensors or anchors density cannot be guaranteed. The dawn of datasets is pushing IPS evaluation to a similar level as machine-learning models, where new proposals are evaluated over many heterogeneous datasets. This paper proposes a way to evaluate IPSs in multiple scenarios, that is validated with three use cases. The results prove that the proposed aggregation of the evaluation metric values is a useful tool for high-level comparison of IPSs.