A Low-Cost and Efficient Indoor Fusion Localization Method

Accurate indoor location information has considerable social and economic value in applications, such as pedestrian heatmapping and indoor navigation. Ultrasonic-based approaches have received significant attention mainly since they have advantages in terms of positioning with temporal correlation. However, it is a great challenge to gain accurate indoor localization due to complex indoor environments such as non-uniform indoor facilities. To address this problem, we propose a fusion localization method in the indoor environment that integrates the localization information of inertial sensors and acoustic signals. Meanwhile, the threshold scheme is used to eliminate outliers during the positioning process. In this paper, the estimated location is fused by the adaptive distance weight for the time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation and improved pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) estimation. Three experimental scenes have been developed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has higher localization accuracy in determining the pedestrian location than the state-of-the-art methods. It resolves the problem of outliers in indoor acoustic signal localization and cumulative errors in inertial sensors. The proposed method achieves better performance in the trade-off between localization accuracy and low cost.