Nest: Networked smartphones for target localization

This paper presents Nest, a novel system using wirelessly connected smartphones to localize remote targets based on sound and image inputs. The system has four major components: image-based localization, acoustics-based localization, wireless ad-hoc networking, and middle-ware services for time synchronization and secure communication. Single-image, two-image, and TDOA-acoustics based methods have been developed and a prototype system has been implemented on Google Nexus One smartphones running Android. Experimental results show that the localization accuracies of the single-image-based and two-image-based method are around 94.6% and up to 92.1%, respectively. The localization errors of the acoustics-based method are within 80 centimeters.