Efficient Indoor Localization Based on Geomagnetism

Geomagnetism is promising for indoor localization due to its omnipresence, high stability, and availability of magnetometers in smartphones. Previous works often fuse it with pedometer via particles, which are computationally intensive and make strong user behavior assumptions. To overcome that, we propose Magil, an approach leveraging geomagnetism for indoor localization. To our best knowledge, this is the first piece of work using geomagnetism for smartphone localization without the need of pedometer or user walking model. Magil is applicable to any open or complex indoor environment. In the offline phase, Magil collects and stores geomagnetic fingerprints while surveyors walk indoors. In the online phase, it employs a fast algorithm to match the geomagnetic variation of the target with the stored fingerprints. Given closely matched segments, Magil constructs user trajectory efficiently with a modified shortest path formulation by selecting and connecting these matched segments.

To further improve accuracy and deployability, we propose MagFi, which extends Magil by fusing it with Wi-Fi. MagFi further collects opportunistic Wi-Fi RSSI for fingerprint construction. We have implemented both Magil and MagFi and conducted extensive experiments in our campus. Results show that our schemes outperform state-of-the-art schemes by a wide margin (often cutting localization error by 30%).