A New Statistical Approach to Calibration-Free Localization Using Unlabeled Crowdsourced Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Hu, Haozhou, Dhillon, Harpreet S., Buehrer, R. Michael
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Hu, Haozhou
Dhillon, Harpreet S.
Buehrer, R. Michael
author_facet Hu, Haozhou
Dhillon, Harpreet S.
Buehrer, R. Michael
contents Fingerprinting-based indoor localization methods typically require labor-intensive site surveys to collect signal measurements at known reference locations and frequent recalibration, which limits their scalability. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting a novel approach for indoor localization that utilizes crowdsourced data without location labels. We leverage the statistical information of crowdsourced data and propose a cumulative distribution function (CDF) based distance estimation method that maps received signal strength (RSS) to distances from access points. This approach overcomes the limitations of conventional distance estimation based on the empirical path loss model by efficiently capturing the impacts of shadow fading and multipath. Compared to fingerprinting, our unsupervised statistical approach eliminates the need for signal measurements at known reference locations. The estimated distances are then integrated into a three-step framework to determine the target location. The localization performance of our proposed method is evaluated using RSS data generated from ray-tracing simulations. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in localization accuracy compared to methods based on the empirical path loss model. Furthermore, our statistical approach, which relies on unlabeled data, achieves localization accuracy comparable to that of the supervised approach, the $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$NN) algorithm, which requires fingerprints with location labels. For reproducibility and future research, we make the ray-tracing dataset publicly available at [2].
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_03619
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A New Statistical Approach to Calibration-Free Localization Using Unlabeled Crowdsourced Data
Hu, Haozhou
Dhillon, Harpreet S.
Buehrer, R. Michael
Signal Processing
Applications
Fingerprinting-based indoor localization methods typically require labor-intensive site surveys to collect signal measurements at known reference locations and frequent recalibration, which limits their scalability. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting a novel approach for indoor localization that utilizes crowdsourced data without location labels. We leverage the statistical information of crowdsourced data and propose a cumulative distribution function (CDF) based distance estimation method that maps received signal strength (RSS) to distances from access points. This approach overcomes the limitations of conventional distance estimation based on the empirical path loss model by efficiently capturing the impacts of shadow fading and multipath. Compared to fingerprinting, our unsupervised statistical approach eliminates the need for signal measurements at known reference locations. The estimated distances are then integrated into a three-step framework to determine the target location. The localization performance of our proposed method is evaluated using RSS data generated from ray-tracing simulations. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in localization accuracy compared to methods based on the empirical path loss model. Furthermore, our statistical approach, which relies on unlabeled data, achieves localization accuracy comparable to that of the supervised approach, the $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$NN) algorithm, which requires fingerprints with location labels. For reproducibility and future research, we make the ray-tracing dataset publicly available at [2].
title A New Statistical Approach to Calibration-Free Localization Using Unlabeled Crowdsourced Data
topic Signal Processing
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03619