A Variational Learning Approach for Concurrent Distance Estimation and Environmental Identification

Wireless propagated signals encapsulate rich information for high-accuracy localization and environment sensing. However, the full exploitation of positional and environmental features as well as their correlation remains challenging in complex propagation environments. In this paper, we propose a methodology of variational inference over deep neural networks for concurrent distance estimation and environmental identification. The proposed approach, namely inter-instance variational auto-encoders (IIns-VAEs), conducts inference with latent variables that encapsulate information about both distance and environmental labels. A deep learning network with instance normalization is designed to approximate the inference concurrently via deep learning. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and the results show the superiority of the proposed IIns-VAE in both distance estimation and environmental identification compared to conventional approaches.