Device-free passive localization from signal subspace eigenvectors

Device-free passive localization enables locating targets (e.g., intruders or victims) that do not carry any radio devices nor do they actively participate in the wireless localization process. This is because the wireless environments will get affected when people move into the area, which result in the changes of Received Signal Strength (RSS) of the wireless links. In this paper, we first show that the localization performance degrades significantly when people are moving in dynamic speeds. This is because existing studies in device-free passive localization system have an implicit assumption that the target is moving at a constant speed, which is not always true in practical scenarios. To cope with targets moving with dynamic speeds, we propose an adaptive speed change detection framework including three components: speed change detection, determination of time-window size and adaptive localization. Two speed change detection schemes have been developed to capture the changes of moving speed and adjust the time-window size adaptively to facilitate effective localization. We demonstrate that our framework is flexible to work with any device-free localization method using signal strength. Results from the real experiments confirm that our approach has over 30% improvement on both median and max localization error, under dynamically changing speed of the target.

Device-free passive (DfP) localization is a new concept in location determination where the tracked entity does not carry any device nor participate actively in the localization process. A DfP system operates by processing the received physical signal of a wireless transmitter at one or more monitoring points. The previously introduced DfP system was shown to enable the tracking of a single intruder with high accuracy in a highly controlled WLAN environment. In this paper, we propose and analyze different algorithms for DfP tracking in a typical indoor WLAN environment, rich in multipath. We also study the effect of the temporal and spatial changes in the environment on the accuracy of the system. In addition, we evaluate the effect of the different configurations of the wireless equipment placement on the DfP localization accuracy. Our results show that our proposed techniques can accurately track the user in typical environments, thus enabling a large number of DfP applications.

Device-free passive localization (DFPL) has been an emerging application with fast increasing development. Channel State Information- (CSI-) based DFPL is recently paid more attention to for fine-granularity and stability of CSI. However, lots of dead spots exist in the area of interest. And the accuracy of localization is not still completely satisfactory, especially for outside of the first Fresnel zone. In our paper, we put forward a new metric to estimate the sensitivity of a receiver to changes in the detecting area. In our experiment, we observe that the performance of DFPL can be raised when the receiver is placed at the location with high receiver sensitivity. Hence, we develop a new high-performance indoor device-free passive localization (HiDFPL), which employs a Bayesian a posteriori approach and possesses high receiver sensitivity. The experiment results demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed scheme.

The increasing demand of indoor Location Based Services (LBS) has made Indoor Positioning System (IPS) a hot research topic. Recently, various machine learning techniques have been developed to tackle the problems of IPS. The WLAN fingerprinting technique is one of the most cost effective choices for IPS due to the use of existing Wi-Fi networks in commercial and public buildings. However, the variation of Received Signal Strength (RSS) at any specific location due to the indoor fading issue leads to serious challenges in the accuracy of the distance estimates. In this paper, we propose a new technique by using Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) multi-classifier based on Multiple Service Set Identifiers (MSSIDs) that are configured on the same access point. A spatial voting scenario for three PNN-classifiers is proposed as a tool to determine the location of the user. Using a spatial voting based technique is specifically designed to tackle the negative impact of the multi-path propagation on the performance of IPS. The proposed system is performed inside the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at Western Michigan University. The performance of the proposed system compared with some of the common methods such as K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) and multi-class support vector machine (SVM). According to the experimental results, the spatial voting of the three PNN-dassifiers can significantly mitigate the adverse effects of RSS variation. The performance of the multi-classifier exhibits superior performance to that of the other single classifiers in all Area of Interest (AOI). Over 3000 m2 AOI, the proposed system achieves localization accuracy < 0.73m and with precision 90 % of the distance error less than 2m.

Device-free passive (DfP) localization is a system envisioned to detect, track, and identify entities that do not carry any device, nor participate actively in the localization process. A DfP system allows using nominal WiFi equipment for intrusion detection, without using any extra hardware, adding smartness to any WiFi-enabled device. In this paper, we focus on the detection function of the DfP system in a real environment. We show that the performance of our previously developed algorithms for detection in a controlled environments, which achieved 100% recall and precision, degrades significantly when tested in a real environment. We present an alternative algorithm, based on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), that has a significant performance increase in a real environment. Our results show that the recall of the system increases by more than 10% when using the proposed MLE without affecting the system's precision.

Radio frequency based device-free passive (DfP) localization techniques have shown great potentials in localizing individual human subjects, without requiring them to carry any radio devices. In this study, we extend the DfP technique to count and localize multiple subjects in indoor environments. To address the impact of multipath on indoor radio signals, we adopt a fingerprinting based approach to infer subject locations from observed signal strengths through profiling the environment. When multiple subjects are present, our objective is to use the profiling data collected by a single subject to count and localize multiple subjects without any extra effort. In order to address the non-linearity of the impact of multiple subjects, we propose a successive cancellation based algorithm to iteratively determine the number of subjects. We model indoor human trajectories as a state transition process, exploit indoor human mobility constraints and integrate all information into a conditional random field (CRF) to simultaneously localize multiple subjects. As a result, we call the proposed algorithm SCPL -- sequential counting, parallel localizing. We test SCPL with two different indoor settings, one with size 150 m2 and the other 400 m2. In each setting, we have four different subjects, walking around in the deployed areas, sometimes with overlapping trajectories. Through extensive experimental results, we show that SCPL can count the present subjects with 86% counting percentage when their trajectories are not completely overlapping. Our localization algorithms are also highly accurate, with an average localization error distance of 1.3 m.

Received signal strength (RSS)/channel state information (CSI) fingerprinting techniques have been widely adopted for wireless local area network (WLAN)-based indoor localization. However, in most of the RSS/CSI fingerprinting techniques, an application/software has to be installed on the target for uploading RSS/CSI information to the localization system. As a result, RSS/CSI fingerprinting cannot achieve passive localization (application-free), which is an essential requirement in many existing localization systems, especially for commercial and military purposes. In this paper, we propose data rate (DR) fingerprinting to achieve passive localization. DR fingerprinting is compatible with most off-the-shelf wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) devices and can be directly implemented in the existing WLAN-based localization system without any extra hardware. In DR fingerprinting, DRs are used to replace the RSS/CSI to form fingerprints, since DR information can be directly obtained by access points (APs). However, the inherent features of DR, including low-resolution and serious fluctuation, significantly impair the performance of DR fingerprinting. For implementing DR fingerprinting, we leverage multiple transmission power levels, propose a time-window mechanism with different fingerprint formulations, design a AP switching strategy, and design a new matching algorithm named dynamic nearest neighbors (DNNs). We conducted extensive experiments in a real-world testbed to study the performance of DR fingerprinting. Specifically, we compared DR fingerprinting with the state-of-the-art RSS/CSI fingerprinting techniques. The experimental results illustrate that DR fingerprinting can achieve the localization accuracy that is comparable to that of the RSS/CSI fingerprinting with the additional benefit of achieving passive localization.

Localization is a key issue for wireless sensor network. The traditional localization methods achieve high location accuracy using received signal strength (RSS) in line of sight (LOS) environment. But the localization accuracy degrades significantly in nonline of sight (NLOS) environment. So the localization in NLOS environment is one of the most challenging for wireless sensor network. In this paper, we propose an RSS based localization algorithm in NLOS environment. A NLOS identification algorithm is firstly proposed. This algorithm does not need the parameters of the NLOS in prior. Then we correct the NLOS measurements by subtracting the mean of NLOS errors. Finally, the Kalman filter is employed to mitigate the process noise. In simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves higher localization accuracy compared with other methods.

A novel Device-free Passive (DfP) Localisation technique that monitors wireless communications and location dependent signal characteristics is presented in this paper. The human body contains more than 70% water which is causing variances in the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements. DfP is a technique to detect a person without the need for any physical devices i.e. tags or sensors. This paper focuses on communication protocols such as Radiogram Protocol, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), outlining the possibility of using these protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Radiograms/histograms and historical data are new concepts in a DfP scenario which can improve the accuracy of location estimation in DfP Localisation.

Due to the wide deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs) and the easy acquirement of received signal strength (RSS), indoor localization based on RSS has attracted considerable attention in both academia and industry. In this paper, we extract the scatter factor from RSS and then propose a novel indoor localization scheme based on location fingerprinting and curve fitting techniques. The scheme is set up in two phases. In the offline phase, we create a fingerprint and apply the curve fitting technique to construct fitted RSS-distance functions in LOS (Line Of Sight) and NLOS (None Line Of Sight) condition, respectively. In online positioning phase, the proposed optimized fingerprinting-based localization algorithm (OFPL) uses trilateration technique to assist the fingerprinting localization in choosing the proper location of the receiver. Through conducting field and extensive experiments, we can draw the conclusion that our proposed algorithm can obtain some improvement in localization accuracy compared with the classical fingerprinting-based localization.

In this paper, we propose a surface correlation based fingerprinting method in sparse Wi-Fi environment. The proposed method can estimate location even with very few Wi-Fi APs by using accumulated spatial RSS pattern. We verify performance of the proposed method through several tests in a building with complex paths. Many studies have developed localization technologies that use measurements such as RSS (Received Signal Strength) or RTT (Round Trip Time) for Wi-Fi signal. All RF have signal noise and distortion problems as well as multipath problem in indoor environments. As the distance from the RF signal source increases, the discrimination of the RSS decreases due to RF signal noise and distortion. Therefore, ambiguity of RSS increases as the distance increases, the performance deteriorates. The conventional RF based localization method have tried to maintain dense RF environment to guarantee stable and accurate performance. However, in order to maintain the dense RF environment, it is becoming a barrier to commercialization of localization technology due to high cost of constructing RF infrastructure and maintenance difficulty. In this paper, we propose a Surface Correlation (SC) based fingerprinting technique to maintain high positioning performance even with few Wi-Fi APs. The surface is the accumulated RSS pattern data during the movement of a pedestrian, which means the spatial RSS pattern. Conventional fingerprinting methods using kNN (k-Nearest Neighbors) and WkNN (Weighted kNN) are very vulnerable to signal noise and distortion because they utilize instantaneous RSS data. The performance of Particle Filter (PF) based localization technology is also degraded in areas where Wi-Fi AP is sparsely distributed. However, the proposed method is very robust against signal noise and distortion because it compares the spatial RSS pattern with the reference RSS pattern on the fingerprinting database. This increases localization accuracy and availability for Wi-Fi coverage. For localization, the proposed method conduct correlation process for the spatial RSS pattern of a pedestrian with reference RSS pattern of database. So, the reference RSS pattern should be extracted from a reference trajectory that matches a pedestrian`s walking path. The proposed method utilize a database of ‘link-node’ structure to dynamically generate a reference trajectory in indoor environment with complicated path. It generate candidate reference trajectories using only MAC address and turn event of Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning (PDR). The proposed method fix a reference trajectory between these candidate trajectories through correlation process of measured RSS pattern with each reference RSS pattern. A reference point on the fixed reference having most similar RSS pattern to a pedestrian`s is considered as a current location. In order to improve performance at a fork where RSS ambiguity increases, the proposed method estimates preferentially for a reference trajectory matching with PDR turn event. The turn event can be wrong due to various motion of a pedestrian. The proposed method selects a correct reference trajectory by continuously performing correlation process on candidate reference trajectories. In order to verify the performance of the proposed surface correlation based fingerprinting method, we conducted several tests in a three-story building. Before the tests, we conducted a survey of Wi-Fi environment to construct fingerprinting database in the building. As a result of the survey, 170 APs are distributed in the building. We reduced the number of APs by 20% from 170 to 17, and analyzed performance of the proposed and conventional localization methods. The test results show that the performance of the conventional localization methods degrade as the number of applied APs decreases. The proposed fingerprinting method shows a 3 meter localization error even with very few Wi-Fi APs, and unlike the conventional fingerprinting method, the localization error is bounded to be within 5m due to the use of spatial RSS pattern. In this paper, we presented the fingerprinting method using the surface correlation in sparse Wi-Fi environment. The proposed fingerprinting method accumulates Wi-Fi RSS during movement of a pedestrian. The proposed method compares the spatial RSS pattern, which is accumulated RSS data, with reference RSS patterns of fingerprinting database. By comparing the RSS patterns, the proposed method greatly improves accuracy as well as stability. In addition, it can be effectively applied in a sparse Wi-Fi environment by improving the availability of ambiguous areas of Wi-Fi coverage. Through these results, we expect to be able to provide accurate and reliable location information even in indoor weak RF environment.

For an indoor localization system based on visible light communication (VLC) by using received signal strength technique, visible light signals used for estimating the distances between each localization target and reference nodes suffer from non-line-of-sight (NLoS) signal propagation, which could introduce large errors in estimating their locations. Both line-of-sight (LoS) link and NLoS link are taken into account in a noisy VLC channel, and thus the NLoS signal and ambient noise are the sources of localization error. Ricean K factor is introduced to evaluate the relation between the value of NLoS signal and the quality of localization in the proposed system. Analytical expressions for the distance measurement error and the upper bound of localization error are derived by using the least squares method. The simulation results show that the estimation of localization error matches the distribution of Ricean K factor in the noisy overall link. The environmental parameters that can be used to decrease the value of Ricean K factor are also discussed in the simulations, which provide the reference of parameters for building an experimental demonstration of a VLC indoor localization system. A comparison is conducted with the previous works to demonstrate the good performance of our scheme.

With the increasing demand of indoor location-based services, such as tracking targets in a smart building, device-free localization technique has attracted great attentions because it can locate the targets without employing any attached devices. Due to the limited space and complexity of the indoor environment, there still exist challenges in terms of high localization accuracy and high efficiency for indoor localization. In this paper, for addressing such issues, we first convert the received signal strength (RSS) signals into image pixels. The localization problem is then formulated as an image classification problem. To well handle the variant RSS images, a deep convolutional neural network is then structured for classification. Finally, for validating the proposed scheme, two real testbeds are built in the indoor environments, including a living room and a corridor of an apartment. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves good localization performance. For example, the localization accuracy can reach up to 100% in the scenario of living room and 97.6% in the corridor. Moreover, the proposed approach outperforms the methods of the K-nearest-neighbor and the support vector machines in both the noiseless and noisy environments.

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation can severely degrade the reliability of communication and localisation accuracy in indoor ultra-wideband (UWB) ‘location-aware’ networks. Link adaptation and NLOS bias mitigation techniques have respectively been proposed to alleviate these effects, but implicitly rely on the ability to accurately distinguish between LOS and NLOS propagation scenarios. A statistical NLOS identification technique based on the hypothesis-testing of received signal parameters in UWB propagation channels is discussed. In contrast to narrowband and wideband signals, UWB signals possess higher temporal resolution and robustness to multipath fading. We show that these characteristics result in differences in the statistics of (a) the time-of-arrival (TOA), (b) the received signal strength (RSS) and (c) the root-mean-squared delay spread (RDS) of the received signals, between LOS and NLOS propagation scenarios, which can be exploited for accurate channel identification. We statistically characterise the ability of TOA, RSS and RDS estimates to distinguish between LOS and NLOS propagation based on an extensive indoor measurement campaign. Our measurement results suggest that the RDS of UWB signals can, even in isolation and without complete statistical information, serve as a robust and computationally efficient indicator of the LOS/NLOS nature of propagation. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the discussed NLOS identification method in a location-tracking application based on indoor UWB measurements.

Educational data mining provides the process of applying different data mining tools and techniques to analyze and visualize the data of an institution and can be used to discover a unique pattern of students' academic performance. Secondary schools are increasing rapidly from past years and progress of the institution can be measured based on student's success and failure rates. Failure rates can be measured in terms of a core subject such as mathematics which has been considered in this proposed system. Real data was collected using school reports and questionnaire method by the Portugal school which has been used for the project. The students will be classified according to the grades assigned for the range of marks scored by them. This involves classifying the students into five levels of grading system starting from grade ‘A’ to grade ‘F’ where grade ‘A’ represents the student getting the highest marks, grade ‘B’ being the second highest, grade ‘C’ being third, grade ‘D’ being the fourth and the grade ‘F’ which implies that the student has failed. To carry out this type of classification many machine learning algorithms can be used to implement it. Comparison was made between the algorithms like Multiclass Support Vector Machine and Neural Networks using the Weka tool. Based on the analysis carried out Multiclass Support Vector Machine showed prominent accuracy. The Multiclass Support Vector Machine is implemented on the basis of one-to-rest strategy use of class labels which is primarily an extension of linear Support Vector Machine. In order to get appropriate results in terms of the accuracy of the model, parameters like ‘C’ and ‘Gamma’ is tuned while implementing Multiclass Support Vector Machine. The result gives a good predictive accuracy based on the grades that are provided by the school. The accuracy of prediction made by Support Vector Machine Classifier is determined by using K-fold cross validation, according to which the accuracy is 89%.