• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
• /
• v.2 no.9
• /
• pp.595-602
• /
• 2013

WiFi fingerprinting is well known as an effective localization technique used for indoor environments. However, this technique requires a large amount of pre-built fingerprint maps over the entire space. Moreover, due to environmental changes, these maps have to be newly built or updated periodically by experts. As a way to avoid this problem, crowd-sourced fingerprint mapping attracts many interests from researchers. This approach supports many volunteer users to share their WiFi fingerprints collected at a specific environment. Therefore, crowd-sourced fingerprinting can automatically update fingerprint maps up-to-date. In most previous systems, however, individual users were asked to enter their positions manually to build their local fingerprint maps. Moreover, the systems do not have any principled mechanism to keep fingerprint maps clean by detecting and filtering out erroneous fingerprints collected from multiple users. In this paper, we present the design of a crowd-sourced fingerprint mapping and localization(CMAL) system. The proposed system can not only automatically build and/or update WiFi fingerprint maps from fingerprint collections provided by multiple smartphone users, but also simultaneously track their positions using the up-to-date maps. The CMAL system consists of multiple clients to work on individual smartphones to collect fingerprints and a central server to maintain a database of fingerprint maps. Each client contains a particle filter-based WiFi SLAM engine, tracking the smartphone user's position and building each local fingerprint map. The server of our system adopts a Gaussian interpolation-based error filtering algorithm to maintain the integrity of fingerprint maps. Through various experiments, we show the high performance of our system.