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Concurrent Positioning, Mapping and Perception of Multi-source Data Fusion for Smart Applications

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2019) | Viewed by 110555

Special Issue Editors

State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Interests: ubiquitous positioning; mobile mapping; smartphone navigation; spatial perception; indoor positioning; simultaneous localization and mapping; GNSS positioning
State Key Laboratory of Geo-Information Engineering, China
Interests: satellite positioning, data fusion, Beidou/GNSS positioning, robust estimation
Department of Geomatics Engineering, The University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
Interests: intelligent and autonomous systems; navigation & positioning technologies; satellite technologies; multi-sensor systems; wireless positioning; vehicles & transportation systems; driverless cars; technology development; applications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The next generations of smart applications require the capability of understanding surrounding environments for intelligent and autonomous objects moving across indoor and outdoor spaces. The spaces need be digitalized as 3D maps, and they are used as the fundamental spatial data infrastructure for smart applications. It calls for innovative developments of mobile mapping of indoor and outdoor spaces, as well as ubiquitous positioning and spatial perception technologies, algorithms and applications.  

Established techniques conducted particularly either positioning (e.g., GNSS) or mapping (e.g., imagery). Advances in emerging sensors, miniaturized mobile platforms (e.g., robot), artificial intelligence methods (e.g., deep learning), and data fusion algorithms allow us to develop multi-source integrated technologies for positioning, mapping and spatial perception in concurrent approaches, which resolve localization of mobile platforms/objects, and simultaneously mapping and understanding the environment. Such concurrent techniques will enable a variety of mobile intelligent systems and applications  

The Special Issue on “Concurrent Positioning, Mapping and Perception of Multi-Source Data Fusion for Smart Applications” accepts papers dealing with the following topics of interest (but is not limited to them):

  • Ubiquitous positioning and localization across indoor and outdoor environments
  • Mobile mapping and digitalization of indoor and outdoor spaces
  • Intelligent spatial perception
  • Simultaneous and reciprocal positioning, mapping and perception of indoor/outdoor environments
  • Smart mobility systems and applications

Prof. Jingbin Liu
Prof. Yuanxi Yang
Prof. Juha Hyyppa
Prof. Naser El-Sheimy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • mobile mapping
  • ubiquitous positioning and localization
  • artificial intelligence
  • computer vision
  • spatial perception
  • simultaneous localization and mapping

Published Papers (21 papers)

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45 pages, 5011 KiB  
Review
A Review of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-Based Dynamic Monitoring Technologies for Structural Health Monitoring
by Nan Shen, Liang Chen, Jingbin Liu, Lei Wang, Tingye Tao, Dewen Wu and Ruizhi Chen
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(9), 1001; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11091001 - 26 Apr 2019
Cited by 79 | Viewed by 9790
Abstract
In the past few decades, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology has been widely used in structural health monitoring (SHM), and the monitoring mode has evolved from long-term deformation monitoring to dynamic monitoring. This paper gives an overview of GNSS-based dynamic monitoring technologies [...] Read more.
In the past few decades, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology has been widely used in structural health monitoring (SHM), and the monitoring mode has evolved from long-term deformation monitoring to dynamic monitoring. This paper gives an overview of GNSS-based dynamic monitoring technologies for SHM. The review is classified into three parts, which include GNSS-based dynamic monitoring technologies for SHM, the improvement of GNSS-based dynamic monitoring technologies for SHM, as well as denoising and detrending algorithms. The significance and progress of Real-Time Kinematic (RTK), Precise Point Position (PPP), and direct displacement measurement techniques, as well as single-frequency technology for dynamic monitoring, are summarized, and the comparison of these technologies is given. The improvement of GNSS-based dynamic monitoring technologies for SHM is given from the perspective of multi-GNSS, a high-rate GNSS receiver, and the integration between the GNSS and accelerometer. In addition, the denoising and detrending algorithms for GNSS-based observations for SHM and corresponding applications are summarized. Challenges of low-cost and widely covered GNSS-based technologies for SHM are discussed, and problems are posed for future research. Full article
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23 pages, 6887 KiB  
Article
NLOS Mitigation in Sparse Anchor Environments with the Misclosure Check Algorithm
by Lei Wang, Ruizhi Chen, Lili Shen, Haiyang Qiu, Ming Li, Peng Zhang and Yuanjin Pan
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(7), 773; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11070773 - 31 Mar 2019
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3008
Abstract
The presence of None-line-of-sight (NLOS) is one of the major challenging issues in time of arrival (TOA) based source localization, especially for the sparse anchor scenarios. Sparse anchors can reduce the system deployment cost, so this has become increasingly popular in the source [...] Read more.
The presence of None-line-of-sight (NLOS) is one of the major challenging issues in time of arrival (TOA) based source localization, especially for the sparse anchor scenarios. Sparse anchors can reduce the system deployment cost, so this has become increasingly popular in the source location. However, fewer anchors bring new challenges to ensure localization precision and reliability, especially in NLOS environments. The maximum likelihood (ML) estimation is the most popular location estimator for its simplicity and efficiency, while it becomes extremely difficult to reliably identify the NLOS measurements when the redundant observations are not enough. In this study, we proposed an NLOS detection algorithm called misclosure check (MC) to overcome this issue, which intends to provide a more reliable location in the sparse anchor environment. The MC algorithm checks the misclosure of different triangles and then obtains the possible NLOS from these misclosures. By forming multiple misclosure conditions, the MC algorithm can identify NLOS measurements reliably, even in a sparse anchor environment. The performance of the MC algorithm is evaluated in a typical sparse anchor environment and the results indicate that the MC algorithm achieves promising NLOS identification capacity without abundant redundant measurements. The real data test also confirmed that the MC algorithm achieves better position precision than other three robust location estimators in an NLOS environment since it can correctly identify more NLOS measurements. Full article
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22 pages, 4245 KiB  
Article
A Robust Dead Reckoning Algorithm Based on Wi-Fi FTM and Multiple Sensors
by Yue Yu, Ruizhi Chen, Liang Chen, Guangyi Guo, Feng Ye and Zuoya Liu
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(5), 504; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11050504 - 01 Mar 2019
Cited by 60 | Viewed by 5586
Abstract
More and more applications of location-based services lead to the development of indoor positioning technology. Wi-Fi-based indoor localization has been attractive due to its extensive distribution and low cost properties. IEEE 802.11-2016 now includes a Wi-Fi Fine Time Measurement (FTM) protocol which provides [...] Read more.
More and more applications of location-based services lead to the development of indoor positioning technology. Wi-Fi-based indoor localization has been attractive due to its extensive distribution and low cost properties. IEEE 802.11-2016 now includes a Wi-Fi Fine Time Measurement (FTM) protocol which provides a more robust approach for Wi-Fi ranging between the mobile terminal and Wi-Fi access point (AP). To improve the positioning accuracy, in this paper, we propose a robust dead reckoning algorithm combining the results of Wi-Fi FTM and multiple sensors (DRWMs). A real-time Wi-Fi ranging model is built which can effectively reduce the Wi-Fi ranging errors, and then a multisensor multi-pattern-based dead reckoning is presented. In addition, the Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is applied to fuse the results of Wi-Fi ranging model and multiple sensors. The experiment results show that the proposed DRWMs algorithm can achieve accurate localization performance in line-of-sight/non-line-of-sight (LOS)/(NLOS) mixed indoor environment. Compared with the traditional Wi-Fi positioning method and the traditional dead reckoning method, the proposed algorithm is more stable and has better real-time performance for indoor positioning. Full article
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19 pages, 5546 KiB  
Article
A Computationally Efficient Semantic SLAM Solution for Dynamic Scenes
by Zemin Wang, Qian Zhang, Jiansheng Li, Shuming Zhang and Jingbin Liu
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1363; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11111363 - 06 Jun 2019
Cited by 47 | Viewed by 4739
Abstract
In various dynamic scenes, there are moveable objects such as pedestrians, which may challenge simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. Consequently, the localization accuracy may be degraded, and a moving object may negatively impact the constructed maps. Maps that contain semantic information of [...] Read more.
In various dynamic scenes, there are moveable objects such as pedestrians, which may challenge simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. Consequently, the localization accuracy may be degraded, and a moving object may negatively impact the constructed maps. Maps that contain semantic information of dynamic objects impart humans or robots with the ability to semantically understand the environment, and they are critical for various intelligent systems and location-based services. In this study, we developed a computationally efficient SLAM solution that is able to accomplish three tasks in real time: (1) complete localization without accuracy loss due to the existence of dynamic objects and generate a static map that does not contain moving objects, (2) extract semantic information of dynamic objects through a computionally efficient approach, and (3) eventually generate semantic maps, which overlay semantic objects on static maps. The proposed semantic SLAM solution was evaluated through four different experiments on two data sets, respectively verifying the tracking accuracy, computational efficiency, and the quality of the generated static maps and semantic maps. The results show that the proposed SLAM solution is computationally efficient by reducing the time consumption for building maps by 2/3; moreover, the relative localization accuracy is improved, with a translational error of only 0.028 m, and is not degraded by dynamic objects. Finally, the proposed solution generates static maps of a dynamic scene without moving objects and semantic maps with high-precision semantic information of specific objects. Full article
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16 pages, 4178 KiB  
Article
Walker: Continuous and Precise Navigation by Fusing GNSS and MEMS in Smartphone Chipsets for Pedestrians
by Feng Zhu, Xianlu Tao, Wanke Liu, Xiang Shi, Fuhong Wang and Xiaohong Zhang
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(2), 139; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11020139 - 12 Jan 2019
Cited by 28 | Viewed by 4845
Abstract
The continual miniaturization of mass-market sensors built in mobile intelligent terminals has inspired the development of accurate and continuous navigation solution for portable devices. With the release of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations from the Android Nougat system, smartphones can provide pseudorange, [...] Read more.
The continual miniaturization of mass-market sensors built in mobile intelligent terminals has inspired the development of accurate and continuous navigation solution for portable devices. With the release of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations from the Android Nougat system, smartphones can provide pseudorange, Doppler, and carrier phase observations of GNSS. However, it is still a challenge to achieve the seamless positioning of consumer applications, especially in environments where GNSS signals suffer from a low signal-to-noise ratio and severe multipath. This paper introduces a dedicated android smartphone application called Walker that integrates the GNSS navigation solution and MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) sensors to enable continuous and precise pedestrian navigation. Firstly, we introduce the generation of GNSS and MEMS observations, in addition to the architecture of Walker application. Then the core algorithm in Walker is given, including the time-differenced carrier phase improved GNSS single-point positioning and the integration of GNSS and Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR). Finally, the Walker application is tested and the observations of GNSS and MEMS are assessed. The static experiment shows that, with GNSS observations, the RMS (root mean square) values of east, north, and up positioning error are 0.49 m, 0.37 m, and 1.01 m, respectively. Furthermore, the kinematic experiment verifies that the proposed method is capable of obtaining accuracy within 1–3 m for smooth and continuous navigation. Full article
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23 pages, 20181 KiB  
Article
Pedestrian Walking Distance Estimation Based on Smartphone Mode Recognition
by Qu Wang, Langlang Ye, Haiyong Luo, Aidong Men, Fang Zhao and Changhai Ou
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(9), 1140; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11091140 - 13 May 2019
Cited by 34 | Viewed by 5472
Abstract
Stride length and walking distance estimation are becoming a key aspect of many applications. One of the methods of enhancing the accuracy of pedestrian dead reckoning is to accurately estimate the stride length of pedestrians. Existing stride length estimation (SLE) algorithms present good [...] Read more.
Stride length and walking distance estimation are becoming a key aspect of many applications. One of the methods of enhancing the accuracy of pedestrian dead reckoning is to accurately estimate the stride length of pedestrians. Existing stride length estimation (SLE) algorithms present good performance in the cases of walking at normal speed and the fixed smartphone mode (handheld). The mode represents a specific state of the carried smartphone. The error of existing SLE algorithms increases in complex scenes with many mode changes. Considering that stride length estimation is very sensitive to smartphone modes, this paper focused on combining smartphone mode recognition and stride length estimation to provide an accurate walking distance estimation. We combined multiple classification models to recognize five smartphone modes (calling, handheld, pocket, armband, swing). In addition to using a combination of time-domain and frequency-domain features of smartphone built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes during the stride interval, we constructed higher-order features based on the acknowledged studies (Kim, Scarlett, and Weinberg) to model stride length using the regression model of machine learning. In the offline phase, we trained the corresponding stride length estimation model for each mode. In the online prediction stage, we called the corresponding stride length estimation model according to the smartphone mode of a pedestrian. To train and evaluate the performance of our SLE, a dataset with smartphone mode, actual stride length, and total walking distance were collected. We conducted extensive and elaborate experiments to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm and compare it with the state-of-the-art SLE algorithms. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed walking distance estimation method achieved significant accuracy improvement over existing individual approaches when a pedestrian was walking in both indoor and outdoor complex environments with multiple mode changes. Full article
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21 pages, 12298 KiB  
Article
GNSS/INS/LiDAR-SLAM Integrated Navigation System Based on Graph Optimization
by Le Chang, Xiaoji Niu, Tianyi Liu, Jian Tang and Chuang Qian
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(9), 1009; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11091009 - 28 Apr 2019
Cited by 90 | Viewed by 8349
Abstract
A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS)/Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) integrated navigation system based on graph optimization is proposed and implemented in this paper. The navigation results are obtained by the information fusion of the GNSS [...] Read more.
A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS)/Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) integrated navigation system based on graph optimization is proposed and implemented in this paper. The navigation results are obtained by the information fusion of the GNSS position, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) preintegration result and the relative pose from the 3D probability map matching with graph optimizing. The sliding window method was adopted to ensure that the computational load of the graph optimization does not increase with time. Land vehicle tests were conducted, and the results show that the proposed GNSS/INS/LiDAR-SLAM integrated navigation system can effectively improve the navigation positioning accuracy compared to GNSS/INS and other current GNSS/INS/LiDAR methods. During the simulation of one-minute periods of GNSS outages, compared to the GNSS/INS integrated navigation system, the root mean square (RMS) of the position errors in the North and East directions of the proposed navigation system are reduced by approximately 82.2% and 79.6%, respectively, and the position error in the vertical direction and attitude errors are equivalent. Compared to the benchmark method of GNSS/INS/LiDAR-Google Cartographer, the RMS of the position errors in the North, East and vertical directions decrease by approximately 66.2%, 63.1% and 75.1%, respectively, and the RMS of the roll, pitch and yaw errors are reduced by approximately 89.5%, 92.9% and 88.5%, respectively. Furthermore, the relative position error during the GNSS outage periods is reduced to 0.26% of the travel distance for the proposed method. Therefore, the GNSS/INS/LiDAR-SLAM integrated navigation system proposed in this paper can effectively fuse the information of GNSS, IMU and LiDAR and can significantly mitigate the navigation error, especially for cases of GNSS signal attenuation or interruption. Full article
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22 pages, 9675 KiB  
Article
IMU/Magnetometer/Barometer/Mass-Flow Sensor Integrated Indoor Quadrotor UAV Localization with Robust Velocity Updates
by You Li, Shady Zahran, Yuan Zhuang, Zhouzheng Gao, Yiran Luo, Zhe He, Ling Pei, Ruizhi Chen and Naser El-Sheimy
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(7), 838; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11070838 - 08 Apr 2019
Cited by 25 | Viewed by 5666
Abstract
Velocity updates have been proven to be important for constraining motion-sensor-based dead-reckoning (DR) solutions in indoor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. The forward velocity from a mass flow sensor and the lateral and vertical non-holonomic constraints (NHC) can be utilized for three-dimensional (3D) [...] Read more.
Velocity updates have been proven to be important for constraining motion-sensor-based dead-reckoning (DR) solutions in indoor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. The forward velocity from a mass flow sensor and the lateral and vertical non-holonomic constraints (NHC) can be utilized for three-dimensional (3D) velocity updates. However, it is observed that (a) the quadrotor UAV may have a vertical velocity trend when it is controlled to move horizontally; (b) the quadrotor may have a pitch angle when moving horizontally; and (c) the mass flow sensor may suffer from sensor errors, especially the scale factor error. Such phenomenons degrade the performance of velocity updates. Thus, this paper presents a multi-sensor integrated localization system that has more effective sensor interactions. Specifically, (a) the barometer data are utilized to detect height changes and thus determine the weight of vertical velocity update; (b) the pitch angle from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and magnetometer data fusion is used to set the weight of forward velocity update; and (c) an extra mass flow sensor calibration module is introduced. Indoor flight tests have indicated the effectiveness of the proposed sensor interaction strategies in enhancing indoor quadrotor DR solutions, which can also be used for detecting outliers in external localization technologies such as ultrasonics. Full article
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18 pages, 4371 KiB  
Article
A Pose Awareness Solution for Estimating Pedestrian Walking Speed
by Guangyi Guo, Ruizhi Chen, Feng Ye, Liang Chen, Yuanjin Pan, Mengyun Liu and Zhipeng Cao
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(1), 55; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11010055 - 29 Dec 2018
Cited by 33 | Viewed by 4316
Abstract
Pedestrian walking speeds (PWS) can be used as a “body speedometer” to reveal health status information of pedestrians and positioning indoors with other locating methods. This paper proposes a pose awareness solution for estimating pedestrian walking speeds using the sensors built in smartphones. [...] Read more.
Pedestrian walking speeds (PWS) can be used as a “body speedometer” to reveal health status information of pedestrians and positioning indoors with other locating methods. This paper proposes a pose awareness solution for estimating pedestrian walking speeds using the sensors built in smartphones. The smartphone usage pose is identified by using a machine learning approach based on data from multiple sensors. The data are then coupled tightly with an adaptive step detection solution to estimate the pedestrian walking speed. Field tests were carried out to verify the advantages of the proposed algorithms compared to existing solutions. The test results demonstrated that the features extracted from the data of the smartphone built-in sensors clearly reveal the characteristics of the pose pattern, with overall accuracy of 98.85% and a kappa statistic of 98.46%. The proposed walking speed estimation solution, running in real-time on a commercial smartphone, performed well, with a mean absolute error of 0.061 m/s, under a challenging walking process combining various usage poses including texting, calling, swinging, and in-pocket modes. Full article
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21 pages, 7384 KiB  
Article
Low-Cost and Efficient Indoor 3D Reconstruction through Annotated Hierarchical Structure-from-Motion
by Youli Ding, Xianwei Zheng, Yan Zhou, Hanjiang Xiong and Jianya Gong
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(1), 58; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11010058 - 29 Dec 2018
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5338
Abstract
With the widespread application of location-based services, the appropriate representation of indoor spaces and efficient indoor 3D reconstruction have become essential tasks. Due to the complexity and closeness of indoor spaces, it is difficult to develop a versatile solution for large-scale indoor 3D [...] Read more.
With the widespread application of location-based services, the appropriate representation of indoor spaces and efficient indoor 3D reconstruction have become essential tasks. Due to the complexity and closeness of indoor spaces, it is difficult to develop a versatile solution for large-scale indoor 3D scene reconstruction. In this paper, an annotated hierarchical Structure-from-Motion (SfM) method is proposed for low-cost and efficient indoor 3D reconstruction using unordered images collected with widely available smartphone or consumer-level cameras. Although the reconstruction of indoor models is often compromised by the indoor complexity, we make use of the availability of complex semantic objects to classify the scenes and construct a hierarchical scene tree to recover the indoor space. Starting with the semantic annotation of the images, images that share the same object were detected and classified utilizing visual words and the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. The SfM method was then applied to hierarchically recover the atomic 3D point cloud model of each object, with the semantic information from the images attached. Finally, an improved random sample consensus (RANSAC) generalized Procrustes analysis (RGPA) method was employed to register and optimize the partial models into a complete indoor scene. The proposed approach incorporates image classification in the hierarchical SfM based indoor reconstruction task, which explores the semantic propagation from images to points. It also reduces the computational complexity of the traditional SfM by avoiding exhausting pair-wise image matching. The applicability and accuracy of the proposed method was verified on two different image datasets collected with smartphone and consumer cameras. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to efficiently and robustly produce semantically and geometrically correct indoor 3D point models. Full article
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23 pages, 3815 KiB  
Article
Improving Wi-Fi Fingerprint Positioning with a Pose Recognition-Assisted SVM Algorithm
by Shuai Zhang, Jiming Guo, Nianxue Luo, Lei Wang, Wei Wang and Kai Wen
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(6), 652; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11060652 - 17 Mar 2019
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 3784
Abstract
The fingerprint method has been widely adopted for Wi-Fi indoor positioning. In the fingerprint matching process, user poses and user body shadowing have serious impact on the received signal strength (RSS) data and degrade matching accuracy; however, this impact has not attracted large [...] Read more.
The fingerprint method has been widely adopted for Wi-Fi indoor positioning. In the fingerprint matching process, user poses and user body shadowing have serious impact on the received signal strength (RSS) data and degrade matching accuracy; however, this impact has not attracted large attention. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of user poses and user body shadowing on the collected RSS data and propose a new method called the pose recognition-assisted support vector machine algorithm (PRASVM). It fully exploits the characteristics of different user poses and improves the support vector machine (SVM) positioning performance by introducing a pose recognition procedure. This proposed method firstly establishes a fingerprint database with RSS and sensor data corresponding to different poses in the offline phase, and fingerprints of different poses in the database are extracted to train reference point (RP) classifiers of different poses and a pose classifier using an SVM algorithm. Secondly, in the online phase, the poses of RSS data measured online are recognised by a pose classifier, and RSS data measured online are grouped with different poses. Then online RSS data from each group at an unknown user location are reclassified as corresponding RPs by the RP classifiers of the corresponding poses. Finally, user location is determined by grouped RSS data corresponding to coordinates of the RPs. By considering the user pose and user body shadowing, the observed RSS data matches the fingerprint database better, and the classification accuracy of grouped online RSS data is remarkably improved. To verify performances of the proposed method, experiments are carried out: one in an office setting, and the other in a lecture hall. The experimental results show that the positioning accuracies of the proposed PRASVM algorithm outperform the conventional weighted k-nearest neighbour (WKNN) algorithm by 52.29% and 40.89%, outperform the SVM algorithm by 73.74% and 60.45%, and outperform the pose recognition-assisted WKNN algorithm by 34.76% and 21.86%, respectively. As a result, the PRASVM algorithm noticeably improves positioning accuracy. Full article
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15 pages, 3231 KiB  
Technical Note
The Integration of Photodiode and Camera for Visible Light Positioning by Using Fixed-Lag Ensemble Kalman Smoother
by Yuan Zhuang, Qin Wang, You Li, Zhouzheng Gao, Bingpeng Zhou, Longning Qi, Jun Yang, Ruizhi Chen and Naser El-Sheimy
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1387; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11111387 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3251
Abstract
Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has become one of the most popular positioning and navigation systems in this decade. Filter-based VLP systems can provide real-time solutions but have limited accuracy. On the contrary, fixed-interval smoothers can help VLP achieve higher accuracy but require post-processing. [...] Read more.
Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has become one of the most popular positioning and navigation systems in this decade. Filter-based VLP systems can provide real-time solutions but have limited accuracy. On the contrary, fixed-interval smoothers can help VLP achieve higher accuracy but require post-processing. In this article, a trade-off solution, Fixed-Lag Ensemble Kalman Smoother (FLEnKS), is proposed for VLP to achieve a semi-real-time and accurate positioning solution. The forward part of the FLEnKS is based on the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), which uses stochastic sampling with ensemble members and enables a better reflection of the features of nonlinear systems. The backward filter in the FLEnKS compensates for the estimation error from the forward filter using the linearization based on error states and further reduces the estimation error. Furthermore, multiple data from both photodiode (PD) and camera are fused in the proposed FLEnKS for VLP, which further improves the accuracy of conventional VLP with a single data source. Preliminary field test results show that the proposed FLEnKS provides a semi-real-time positioning solution with the average 3D positioning accuracy of 15.63 cm in dynamic tests. Full article
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24 pages, 6203 KiB  
Article
Tight Fusion of a Monocular Camera, MEMS-IMU, and Single-Frequency Multi-GNSS RTK for Precise Navigation in GNSS-Challenged Environments
by Tuan Li, Hongping Zhang, Zhouzheng Gao, Xiaoji Niu and Naser El-sheimy
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(6), 610; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11060610 - 13 Mar 2019
Cited by 96 | Viewed by 6777
Abstract
Precise position, velocity, and attitude is essential for self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The integration of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) real-time kinematics (RTK) and inertial measurement units (IMUs) is able to provide high-accuracy navigation solutions in open-sky conditions, but the [...] Read more.
Precise position, velocity, and attitude is essential for self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The integration of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) real-time kinematics (RTK) and inertial measurement units (IMUs) is able to provide high-accuracy navigation solutions in open-sky conditions, but the accuracy will be degraded severely in GNSS-challenged environments, especially integrated with the low-cost microelectromechanical system (MEMS) IMUs. In order to navigate in GNSS-denied environments, the visual–inertial system has been widely adopted due to its complementary characteristics, but it suffers from error accumulation. In this contribution, we tightly integrate the raw measurements from the single-frequency multi-GNSS RTK, MEMS-IMU, and monocular camera through the extended Kalman filter (EKF) to enhance the navigation performance in terms of accuracy, continuity, and availability. The visual measurement model from the well-known multistate constraint Kalman filter (MSCKF) is combined with the double-differenced GNSS measurement model to update the integration filter. A field vehicular experiment was carried out in GNSS-challenged environments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Results indicate that both multi-GNSS and vision contribute significantly to the centimeter-level positioning availability in GNSS-challenged environments. Meanwhile, the velocity and attitude accuracy can be greatly improved by using the tightly-coupled multi-GNSS RTK/INS/Vision integration, especially for the yaw angle. Full article
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27 pages, 6024 KiB  
Article
A Robust Wi-Fi Fingerprint Positioning Algorithm Using Stacked Denoising Autoencoder and Multi-Layer Perceptron
by Rongrong Wang, Zhaohui Li, Haiyong Luo, Fang Zhao, Wenhua Shao and Qu Wang
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1293; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11111293 - 30 May 2019
Cited by 43 | Viewed by 4574
Abstract
With the increasing demand for location-based services, Wi-Fi-based indoor positioning technology has attracted much attention in recent years because of its ubiquitous deployment and low cost. Considering that Wi-Fi signals fluctuate greatly with time, extracting robust features of Wi-Fi signals is the key [...] Read more.
With the increasing demand for location-based services, Wi-Fi-based indoor positioning technology has attracted much attention in recent years because of its ubiquitous deployment and low cost. Considering that Wi-Fi signals fluctuate greatly with time, extracting robust features of Wi-Fi signals is the key point to maintaining good positioning accuracy. To handle the dynamic fluctuation with time and sparsity of Wi-Fi signals, we propose an SDAE (Stacked Denoising Autoencoder)-based feature extraction method, which can obtain a robust and time-independent Wi-Fi fingerprint by learning the reconstruction distribution from a raw Wi-Fi signal and an artificial-noise-added Wi-Fi signal. We also leverage the strong representation ability of MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) to build a regression model, which maps the extracted features to the corresponding location. To fully evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm, three datasets are applied, which represent three different scenarios, namely, spacious area with time interval, no time interval, and complex area with large time interval. The experimental results confirm the validity of our proposed SDAE-based feature extraction method, which can accurately reflect Wi-Fi signals in corresponding locations. Compared with other regression models, our proposed regression model can better map the extracted features to the target position. The average positioning error of our proposed algorithm is 4.24 m when there is a 52-day interval between training dataset and testing dataset. That confirms that the proposed algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art positioning algorithms when there is a large time interval between training dataset and testing dataset. Full article
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18 pages, 10810 KiB  
Article
Tikhonov Regularization Based Modeling and Sidereal Filtering Mitigation of GNSS Multipath Errors
by Guobin Chang, Chao Chen, Yuanxi Yang and Tianhe Xu
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(11), 1801; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs10111801 - 14 Nov 2018
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 3974
Abstract
In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) relative positioning applications, multipath errors are non-negligible. Mitigation of the multipath error is an important task for precise positioning and it is possible due to the repeatability, even without any rigorous mathematical model. Empirical modeling is required [...] Read more.
In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) relative positioning applications, multipath errors are non-negligible. Mitigation of the multipath error is an important task for precise positioning and it is possible due to the repeatability, even without any rigorous mathematical model. Empirical modeling is required for this mitigation. In this work, the multipath error modeling using carrier phase measurement residuals is realized by solving a regularization problem. Two Tikhonov regularization schemes, namely with the first and the second order differences, are considered. For each scheme, efficient numerical algorithms are developed to find the solutions, namely the Thomas algorithm and Cholesky rank-one update algorithm for the first and the second differences, respectively. Regularization parameters or Lagrange multipliers are optimized using the bootstrap method. In experiment, data on the first day are processed to construct a multipath model for each satellite (except the reference one), and then the model is used to correct the measurement on the second day, namely following the sidereal filtering approach. The smoothness of the coordinates calculated using the corrected measurements is improved significantly compared to those using the raw measurement. The efficacy of the proposed method is illustrated by the actual calculation. Full article
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19 pages, 10946 KiB  
Article
A New RGB-D SLAM Method with Moving Object Detection for Dynamic Indoor Scenes
by Runzhi Wang, Wenhui Wan, Yongkang Wang and Kaichang Di
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(10), 1143; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11101143 - 14 May 2019
Cited by 66 | Viewed by 6169
Abstract
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods based on an RGB-D camera have been studied and used in robot navigation and perception. So far, most such SLAM methods have been applied to a static environment. However, these methods are incapable of avoiding the drift [...] Read more.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods based on an RGB-D camera have been studied and used in robot navigation and perception. So far, most such SLAM methods have been applied to a static environment. However, these methods are incapable of avoiding the drift errors caused by moving objects such as pedestrians, which limits their practical performance in real-world applications. In this paper, a new RGB-D SLAM with moving object detection for dynamic indoor scenes is proposed. The proposed detection method for moving objects is based on mathematical models and geometric constraints, and it can be incorporated into the SLAM process as a data filtering process. In order to verify the proposed method, we conducted sufficient experiments on the public TUM RGB-D dataset and a sequence image dataset from our Kinect V1 camera; both were acquired in common dynamic indoor scenes. The detailed experimental results of our improved RGB-D SLAM were summarized and demonstrate its effectiveness in dynamic indoor scenes. Full article
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16 pages, 5262 KiB  
Article
Multi-GNSS Combined Precise Point Positioning Using Additional Observations with Opposite Weight for Real-Time Quality Control
by Wenju Fu, Guanwen Huang, Yuanxi Yang, Qin Zhang, Bobin Cui, Maorong Ge and Harald Schuh
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(3), 311; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11030311 - 04 Feb 2019
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4079
Abstract
The emergence of multiple global navigation satellite systems (multi-GNSS), including global positioning system (GPS), global navigation satellite system (GLONASS), Beidou navigation satellite system (BDS), and Galileo, brings not only great opportunities for real-time precise point positioning (PPP), but also challenges in quality control [...] Read more.
The emergence of multiple global navigation satellite systems (multi-GNSS), including global positioning system (GPS), global navigation satellite system (GLONASS), Beidou navigation satellite system (BDS), and Galileo, brings not only great opportunities for real-time precise point positioning (PPP), but also challenges in quality control because of inevitable data anomalies. This research aims at achieving the real-time quality control of the multi-GNSS combined PPP using additional observations with opposite weight. A robust multiple-system combined PPP estimation is developed to simultaneously process observations from all the four GNSS systems as well as single, dual, or triple systems. The experiment indicates that the proposed quality control can effectively eliminate the influence of outliers on the single GPS and the multiple-system combined PPP. The analysis on the positioning accuracy and the convergence time of the proposed robust PPP is conducted based on one week’s data from 32 globally distributed stations. The positioning root mean square (RMS) error of the quad-system combined PPP is 1.2 cm, 1.0 cm, and 3.0 cm in the east, north, and upward components, respectively, with the improvements of 62.5%, 63.0%, and 55.2% compared to those of single GPS. The average convergence time of the quad-system combined PPP in the horizontal and vertical components is 12.8 min and 12.2 min, respectively, while it is 26.5 min and 23.7 min when only using single-GPS PPP. The positioning performance of the GPS, GLONASS, and BDS (GRC) combination and the GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo (GRE) combination is comparable to the GPS, GLONASS, BDS and Galileo (GRCE) combination and it is better than that of the GPS, BDS, and Galileo (GCE) combination. Compared to GPS, the improvements of the positioning accuracy of the GPS and GLONASS (GR) combination, the GPS and Galileo (GE) combination, the GPS and BDS (GC) combination in the east component are 53.1%, 43.8%, and 40.6%, respectively, while they are 55.6%, 48.1%, and 40.7% in the north component, and 47.8%, 40.3%, and 34.3% in the upward component. Full article
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24 pages, 791 KiB  
Article
A Pairwise SSD Fingerprinting Method of Smartphone Indoor Localization for Enhanced Usability
by Fan Yang, Jian Xiong, Jingbin Liu, Changqing Wang, Zheng Li, Pengfei Tong and Ruizhi Chen
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(5), 566; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11050566 - 08 Mar 2019
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3627
Abstract
Smartphone indoor localization has attracted considerable attention over the past decade because of the considerable business potential in terms of indoor navigation and location-based services. In particular, Wi-Fi RSS (received signal strength) fingerprinting for indoor localization has received significant attention in the industry, [...] Read more.
Smartphone indoor localization has attracted considerable attention over the past decade because of the considerable business potential in terms of indoor navigation and location-based services. In particular, Wi-Fi RSS (received signal strength) fingerprinting for indoor localization has received significant attention in the industry, for its advantage of freely using off-the-shelf APs (access points). However, RSS measured by heterogeneous mobile devices is generally biased due to the variety of embedded hardware, leading to a systematical mismatch between online measures and the pre-established radio maps. Additionally, the fingerprinting method based on a single RSS measurement usually suffers from signal fluctuations due to environmental changes or human body blockage, leading to possible large localization errors. In this context, this study proposes a space-constrained pairwise signal strength differences (PSSD) strategy to improve Wi-Fi fingerprinting reliability, and mitigate the effect of hardware bias of different smartphone devices on positioning accuracy without requiring a calibration process. With the efforts of these two aspects, the proposed solution enhances the usability of Wi-Fi fingerprint positioning. The PSSD approach consists of two critical operations in constructing particular fingerprints. First, we construct the signal strength difference (SSD) radio map of the area of interest, which uses the RSS differences between APs to minimize the device-dependent effect. Then, the pairwise RSS fingerprints are constructed by leveraging the time-series RSS measurements and potential spatial topology of pedestrian locations of these measurement epochs, and consequently reducing possible large positioning errors. To verify the proposed PSSD method, we carry out extensive experiments with various Android smartphones in a campus building. In the case of heterogeneous devices, the experimental results demonstrate that PSSD fingerprinting achieves a mean error ∼20% less than conventional RSS fingerprinting. In addition, PSSD fingerprinting achieves a 90-percentile accuracy of no greater than 5.5 m across the tested heterogeneous smartphones Full article
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19 pages, 2836 KiB  
Article
A Novel Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Algorithm for Multi-Mode Recognition Based on Smartphones
by Limin Xu, Zhi Xiong, Jianye Liu, Zhengchun Wang and Yiming Ding
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(3), 294; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11030294 - 01 Feb 2019
Cited by 36 | Viewed by 7343
Abstract
With the rapid development of smartphone technology, pedestrian navigation based on built-in inertial sensors in smartphones shows great application prospects. Currently, most smartphone-based pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) algorithms normally require a user to hold the phone in a fixed mode and, thus, need [...] Read more.
With the rapid development of smartphone technology, pedestrian navigation based on built-in inertial sensors in smartphones shows great application prospects. Currently, most smartphone-based pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) algorithms normally require a user to hold the phone in a fixed mode and, thus, need to correct the gyroscope heading with inputs from other sensors, which restricts the viability of pedestrian navigation significantly. In this paper, in order to improve the accuracy of the traditional step detection and step length estimation method for different users, a state transition-based step detection method and a step length estimation method using a neural network are proposed. In order to decrease the heading errors and inertial sensor errors in multi-mode system, a multi-mode intelligent recognition method based on a neural network was constructed. On this basis, we propose a heading correction method based on zero angular velocity and an overall correction method based on lateral velocity limitation (LV). Experimental results show that the maximum positioning errors obtained by the proposed algorithm are about 0.9% of the total path length. The proposed novel PDR algorithm dramatically enhances the user experience and, thus, has high value in real applications. Full article
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22 pages, 19222 KiB  
Article
The Preliminary Results for Five-System Ultra-Rapid Precise Orbit Determination of the One-Step Method Based on the Double-Difference Observation Model
by Fei Ye, Yunbin Yuan, Bingfeng Tan, Zhiguo Deng and Jikun Ou
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(1), 46; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11010046 - 29 Dec 2018
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3253
Abstract
The predicted parts of ultra-rapid orbits are important for (near) real-time Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) precise applications; and there is little research on GPS/GLONASS/BDS/Galileo/QZSS five-system ultra-rapid precise orbit determination; based on the one-step method and double-difference observation model. However; the successful development [...] Read more.
The predicted parts of ultra-rapid orbits are important for (near) real-time Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) precise applications; and there is little research on GPS/GLONASS/BDS/Galileo/QZSS five-system ultra-rapid precise orbit determination; based on the one-step method and double-difference observation model. However; the successful development of a software platform for solving five-system ultra-rapid orbits is the basis of determining and analyzing these orbits. Besides this; the different observation models and processing strategies facilitate to validate the reliability of the various ultra-rapid orbits. In this contribution; this paper derives the double-difference observation model of five-system ultra-rapid precise orbit determination; based on a one-step method; and embeds this method and model into Bernese v5.2; thereby forming a new prototype software platform. For validation purposes; 31 days of real tracking data; collected from 130 globally-distributed International GNSS Service (IGS) multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) stations; are used to determine a five-system ultra-rapid precise orbit. The performance of the software platform is evaluated by analysis of the orbit discontinuities at day boundaries and by comparing the consistency with the MGEX orbits from the Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ); between the results of this new prototype software platform and the ultra-rapid orbit provided by the International GNSS Monitoring and Assessment System (iGMAS) analysis center (AC) at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics (IGG). The test results show that the average standard deviations of orbit discontinuities in the three-dimension direction are 0.022; 0.031; 0.139; 0.064; 0.028; and 0.465 m for GPS; GLONASS; BDS Inclined Geosynchronous Orbit (IGSO); BDS Mid-Earth Orbit (MEO); Galileo; and QZSS satellites; respectively. In addition; the preliminary results of the new prototype software platform show that the consistency of this platform has been significantly improved compared to the software package of the IGGAC. Full article
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39 pages, 8779 KiB  
Article
Research on Time-Correlated Errors Using Allan Variance in a Kalman Filter Applicable to Vector-Tracking-Based GNSS Software-Defined Receiver for Autonomous Ground Vehicle Navigation
by Yiran Luo, Jian Li, Chunyang Yu, Bing Xu, You Li, Li-Ta Hsu and Naser El-Sheimy
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(9), 1026; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs11091026 - 30 Apr 2019
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5062
Abstract
The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) has been applied to many areas, e.g., the autonomous ground vehicle, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), precision agriculture, smart city, and the GNSS-reflectometry (GNSS-R), being of considerable significance over the past few decades. Unfortunately, the GNSS signal performance [...] Read more.
The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) has been applied to many areas, e.g., the autonomous ground vehicle, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), precision agriculture, smart city, and the GNSS-reflectometry (GNSS-R), being of considerable significance over the past few decades. Unfortunately, the GNSS signal performance has the high risk of being reduced by the environmental interference. The vector tracking (VT) technique is promising to enhance the robustness in high dynamics as well as improve the sensitivity against the weak environment of the GNSS receiver. However, the time-correlated error coupled in the receiver clock estimations in terms of the VT loop can decrease the accuracy of the navigation solution. There are few works present dealing with this issue. In this work, the Allan variance is accordingly exploited to specify a model which is expected to account for this type of error based on the 1st-order Gauss-Markov (GM) process. Then, it is used for proposing an enhanced Kalman filter (KF) by which this error can be suppressed. Furthermore, the proposed system model makes use of the innovation sequence so that the process covariance matrix can be adaptively adjusted and updated. The field tests demonstrate the performance of the proposed adaptive vector-tracking time-correlated error suppressed Kalman filter (A-VTTCES-KF). When compared with the results produced by the ordinary adaptive KF algorithm in terms of the VT loop, the real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning and code-based differential global positioning system (DGPS) positioning accuracies have been improved by 14.17% and 9.73%, respectively. On the other hand, the RTK positioning performance has been increased by maximum 21.40% when compared with the results obtained from the commercial low-cost U-Blox receiver. Full article
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