SparseLoc: Indoor Localization Using Sparse Representation

With the popularity of smart mobile devices, "context-aware" applications have attracted intense interest, for which location is one of the most essential contexts. Compared with outdoor localization, indoor localization has received much more attention from both academia and industry these days. Given the widespread use of WiFi hotspots, the received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint-based indoor localization technique is considered as a promising and practical solution because of its relatively high accuracy and low infrastructure cost. Inspired by our observation that sparsity is inherent to the WiFi signal, we present a new RSS fingerprint-based indoor localization approach, called SparseLoc. Through sparse representation of the fingerprints, SparseLoc can estimate a smart mobile device's location with a small error most of the time. Although the correlation between neighboring fingerprints affects the localization accuracy, SparseLoc uses the similarity between principal components of fingerprints to alleviate this effect. Based on the empirical experiments, we demonstrate that SparseLoc improves the localization accuracy by over 25% compared with the existing WiFi signal-based localization methods.