Geomagnetism-Aided Indoor Wi-Fi Radio-Map Construction via Smartphone Crowdsourcing

Wi-Fi radio-map construction is an important phase in indoor fingerprint localization systems. Traditional methods for Wi-Fi radio-map construction have the problems of being time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, an indoor Wi-Fi radio-map construction method is proposed which utilizes crowdsourcing data contributed by smartphone users. We draw indoor pathway map and construct Wi-Fi radio-map without requiring manual site survey, exact floor layout and extra infrastructure support. The key novelty is that it recognizes road segments from crowdsourcing traces by a cluster based on magnetism sequence similarity and constructs an indoor pathway map with Wi-Fi signal strengths annotated on. Through experiments in real world indoor areas, the method is proved to have good performance on magnetism similarity calculation, road segment clustering and pathway map construction. The Wi-Fi radio maps constructed by crowdsourcing data are validated to provide competitive indoor localization accuracy.