An enhanced pedestrian dead reckoning approach for pedestrian tracking using smartphones

This paper proposes an approach for pedestrian tracking using dead reckoning on a standard smartphone. Previous studies report tracking pedestrians when the mobile device is carried in a defined way within the tracking period. This paper presents a new approach which extends and enhances previous methods by identifying three typical modes of carrying the device during walking and using that fact to enhance tracking accuracy. Based on the real-time identification of modes, a light-weight step based tracking algorithm is developed with a novel step length estimation model. The tracking system is implemented on a commercial off-the-shelf smartphone equipped with a built-in Inertial Measurement Unit. It achieves real-time tracking and localization performance with typically sub-meter error.