A robust dead-reckoning pedestrian tracking system with low cost sensors

The emergence of personal mobile device with low cost sensors, such as accelerometer and digital compass, has made dead-reckoning (DR) an attractive choice for indoor pedestrian tracking. In this paper, we propose a robust DR pedestrian tracking system on top of such commercially accessible sensor sets capable of DR. The proposed method exploits the fact that, multiple DR systems, carried by the same pedestrian, have stable relative displacements with respect to the center of motion, and therefore to each other. We first formulate the robust tracking task as a generalized maximum a posteriori sensor fusion problem, and then we narrow it to a simple computation procedure with certain assumptions. A prototype is implemented and evaluated with a benchmark system that collects ground truth efficiently and accurately. In a practical indoor testbed, the proposed scheme has exhibited robust tracking performance, with reduction in average tracking error up to 73.7%, compared to traditional DR tracking methods.