Indoor Device-free Localization Using Received Signal Strength Indicator and Illuminance Sensor for Random-forest-based Fingerprint Technique

Indoor device-free localization (IDFL) offers more flexibility than conventional indoor localization (device-based) systems, as the targets or objects need not be equipped with any device to be located. In the process of IDFL, the target is passive, enabling applications such as monitoring of elderly people, security systems to detect intruders, and indoor navigation. Despite having more flexibility than device-based systems, IDFL is still inferior in terms of localization performance. The most commonly used technique for IDFL is the fingerprint technique, which uses the uniqueness of spatial information to predict the target's location. The spatial information is a fingerprint database containing information on locations and their corresponding parameters. The most specific parameter for the fingerprint database is the received signal strength indicator (RSSI). RSSI can be obtained directly from many low-cost devices, i.e., Wi-Fi-based devices, without the need to install additional hardware. The fingerprint technique is a two-phase process: the database is constructed in the offline phase, and a matching process to compare the target's current parameter with those in the database is performed in the online phase. We propose fingerprint-technique-based IDFL using RSSI and illumination from an illuminance sensor as the additional parameters of the fingerprint database. Both parameters are recorded by considering two scenarios: an empty room and a person standing in the fingerprint grids. The constructed database is the person-filled room subtracted from the empty room database. We use random forest, one of the machine learning (ML) algorithms, as the pattern-matching algorithm. We evaluate its performance by comparison with two other ML algorithms: k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) and neural networks (NN). The results show that k-NN has better accuracy than the random forest for learning and testing in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE). On the other hand, the random forest has better accuracy than NN and better precision than either k-NN or NN for learning and testing in terms of the standard deviation (STD). The results show the possibility of improving the IDFL performance by adding more parameters to the fingerprint database and using an ML-based pattern-matching algorithm.