Near Relation-Based Indoor Positioning Method under Sparse Wi-Fi Fingerprints

Indoor positioning is of great importance in the era of mobile computing. Currently, considerable focus has been on RSS-based locations because they can provide position information without additional equipment. However, this method suffers from two challenges: (1) fingerprint ambiguity and (2) labour-intensive fingerprint collection. To overcome these drawbacks, we provide a near relation-based indoor positioning method under a sparse Wi-Fi fingerprint. To effectively obtain the fingerprint database, certain interpolation methods are used to enrich sparse Wi-Fi fingerprints. A near relation boundary is provided, and Wi-Fi fingerprints are constrained to this region to reduce fingerprint ambiguity, which can also improve the efficiency of fingerprint matching. Extensive experiments show that the kriging interpolation method performs well, and a positioning accuracy of 2.86 m can be achieved with a near relation under a 1 m interpolation density.