Pedestrian trajectory estimation based on foot-mounted inertial navigation system for multistory buildings in post-processing mode

Acquiring accurate and reliable pedestrian trajectories is essential for providing indoor location-based services. Although a foot-mounted inertial navigation system (Foot-INS) can acquire pedestrian trajectories in multistory buildings, it will inevitably encounter heading divergence because the constraint information is not always valid. Therefore, we proposed an accurate and convenient post-processing indoor pedestrian positioning system (IPPS) to acquire pedestrian trajectories in multistory buildings such as shopping malls. Based on the hypotheses that the start and end points of the pedestrian trajectories on a single floor were closed, and the horizontal position of the closing point on each floor was identical. Therefore, in the single floor of multistory buildings, we use the closing point to control the trajectory drift error caused by the Foot-INS, and use a smoothing algorithm to reasonably distribute the drift error to the entire trajectory. Heading divergence is unavoidable with the Foot-INS, result in the pedestrian trajectories acquired on different floors were rotationally offset. Because pedestrian trajectories can epitomize the building orientation and provide an opportunity to align those trajectories on multistory buildings, an algorithm was proposed to match the trajectories acquired on different floors. A hybrid simulation experiment was conducted using an accurate reference object to evaluate the positioning performance of the proposed IPPS. The effectiveness of acquiring pedestrian trajectories was also confirmed by various experimental tests in a large shopping mall. The study findings suggest that the proposed IPPS is self-contained, low-cost, and has the potential for large-scale applications.