Skeleton-Based Positioning and Reference Point Deployment for Hybrid Wireless Localization

Nowadays, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth based indoor localization algorithms are designed to improve the effects from variation of receive signal strength (RSS) at different locations. However, the positioning accuracy of targeting device is highly related to the indoor topological layout, e.g., the blocking effects from partitioning walls. In this paper we propose a novel skeleton-based positioning and reference point deployment for hybrid wireless localization (S-PDH) that utilizes the spatial skeleton of indoor layout to improve location estimation accuracy. Firstly, we adopt an automatic map analysis algorithm to generate appropriate reference points (RPs) from the spatial skeleton of indoor layout. Secondly, we propose a novel clustering algorithm to consider both spatial layout and RSS information in order to enhance the accuracy of RP matching. Those outlier RPs resulting poor performance will be replaced by appropriate deployment of BLE APs. Finally, the cluster-based positioning algorithm is presented to estimate the target’s location. Compared to existing methods, both the simulation and experimental results show that the proposed S-PDH system can achieve better positioning accuracy along with the benefits of automatically generating the spatial layout information for wireless indoor localization.