Name: Souvik Pal Roll Num: 113059003

Title: Indoor Location Sensing Using Geo-Magnetism Summary:

An indoor location sensing mechanism using earths magnetic field distortion is presented. The distortion due to metallic skeleton of a building is mapped to uniquely identify each location with the help of e-compasses. Measurement and experiment are carried over on different locations and the paper claims to achieve and accuracy of 1 m is achieved 88% of time. The magnetic field though varies significantly within different floors of the building, it is found to be stable with time. In near proximity of other objects the magnetic field response changes. Several methods that complement this method to improve accuracy are also discussed.

Detailed Notes:
Access to location information is the foundation to any context aware services. Outdoor locations can be accurately determined by GPS technology. However, it requires line-of-sight for accurate measurement and hence cannot be used for indoor purpose. There are several methods based on WLAN fingerprinting, Infrared LEDs, Image processing etc that works well inside a building but incur certain cost (infrastructural or computational) . It is found that due to the presence of steel structure inside a building distorts the magnetic field of the Earth and e-compasses behave erratically. These distortions can be uniquely mapped to particular locations. Based on this, an indoor location sensing mechanism is proposed that has an accuracy of 1 meter 88% of time. System Setup: The proposed system is based on the client server architecture. Using a single e-compass, mounted upon a stepper motor that rotates the compass with a diameter of 5cm in 100 steps, different locations of the building are investigated. Two sets of data are collected: one for magnetic field fingerprint map and the other for testing. Every 2 feet one meter above the floor, data are collected. The magnetic field is measured as a vector m = [mx my mz]. The map data set: E = [m0,0 m0,1 m0,K mL,K], where L and K are location and direction index respectively. Algorithm: The Algorithm is fairly simple and involves Least RMS based Nearest Neighborhood determination: given a map dataset E and target location fingerprint d, then a nearest neighbor of d, d is defined as: , Where di is the ith feature component of d. In order to find the optimum number of sensors, 8 different RMS differences are computed with 8 different combination of m in d. Increasing number of sensors increases the accuracy, but also incurs more cost. 5 sensors system is found to be most cost effective. 70% of the predicted data had error less than 2 meter. Based on the observed low error, a pedestrian localization system prototype is designed with 4 sensors. The devise can be worn like a badge near the chest. Unlike previous case, the sensors are now in vertical plane. Since the magnetic field responses on the three planes are found to be similar, sensors will to behave similarly. For creating the fingerprint map, 120 samples are collected from each measurement location, whereas only one sample for the test data is collected per location.

The algorithm is slightly modified for accommodating four 3-d vectors. draw = [mx1 my1 mz1 mx2 my2 mz2 mx3 my3 mz3 mx4 my4 mz4] EL,K = [d1,1 d1,2 d1,K dL,K ], L and K are location and direction index respectively In addition to draw two other vectors unit vector u and norm n are defined as: dnorm = [n1 n2 n3 n4], where dunit_vector = [ux1 uy1 uz1 ux2 uy2 uz2 ux3 uy3 uz3 ux4 uy4 uz4] where u(xyz) = m(xyz)/nk Results and Analysis: Result shows that most of the points are correctly identified however there are some outliers. Location Mean error SD error Max error Remarks Corridor 6.28 m 12.8 m 52.6 m 75.7 % of predicted positions have error < 1m Atrium 2.84 m 3.39 m 12.8 m 72 % of predicted positions have error < 1m Greater error in corridor is due to the large search space. Outliers can be reduced with the help of other positioning techniques like WLAN or Bluetooth beacons. Using constraint in the algorithm like comparing the three position vectors draw dnorm dunit_vector and accepting the position if they are close can significantly enhance performance from 88% (corridor) to 86.6% (atrium). This type of predictions can result in higher update time as many predictions will be rejected. The magnetic field is found to vary distinguishably in different floor with similar infrastructure. Experiment shows that all the sample locations are correctly classified into two different floors. In order to test the stability of magnetic field, test sets are collected at different times and following are computed.

Result shows that even after 6 months, the magnitude and direction are 99.9% similar to the initial records. Effects of different objects are also evaluated and it is found that small objects like wrist watch or laptop do not effect severely if kept 5 away. However in case of large objects like elevator, the effect fades out at a distance of 1.2 m. Taking the device inside the elevator, it correctly identified the floors which indicates that tracking can also be done by this device.

Positive Aspects:
1. 2. 3. 4. There is no infrastructural overhead unlike other related works. Experiments done on various scenarios show appreciable results. Related works are presented in tabular format for easy comparison. Limitations and assumptions are cited as and when is required.

Negative Aspects:
1. The entire algorithm is based on the fact that presence of metallic skeleton inside the building. May not work at all in other scenarios. 2. Cost of constructing the magnetic field map is high and time consuming. 3. Error increases with increase in search space. 4. Algorithm does not put any upper bound on error.