Pedestrian dead reckoning based on human activity sensing knowledge

Abstract

This research addresses improvement of the accuracy of pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), which is one effective technique to estimate indoor positions using smartphone sensors. Even though various techniques using step lengths and their number have been previously proposed for PDR, insufficient accuracy is gotten from smartphone sensors. In this research, we define human activity sensing knowledge and propose improvements to PDR accuracy based on it. Human activity sensing knowledge consists of four kinds of information: pedestrian, environmental, activity, and terminal. Previous studies separately used these kinds of information; however, no study has systematically arranged them for use in PDR. We improved PDR accuracy by adjusting the step length in passages and on stairs and revised activity recognition error with human activity sensing knowledge. To investigate the effectiveness of that strategy, we used HASC-IPSC, which is an indoor pedestrian sensing corpus. After our investigation, activity recognition accuracy improved from 71.2% to 91.4%, and the distance estimation error was reduced from approximately 27 m to approximately 7 m using human activity sensing knowledge.