Adaptive pedestrian activity classification for indoor dead reckoning systems

A pedestrian activity classification (PAC) system classifies pedestrian motion data into activities related to the usage of specific building facilities, such as going up on an escalator or descending a staircase. Recent studies confirm that use of PAC significantly reduces indoor localization errors of a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) system as exact facility locations in the building can be retrieved from the floor map. However, classification complexity may become an issue for resource constraint mobile devices. We propose a novel PAC system that, instead of using a single complex classifier based on a large set of features, employs multiple simple classifiers each trained to classify only a subset of the activities using a small number of features. As the pedestrian moves around inside a building, the proposed adaptive-PAC dynamically switches to the right (simple) classifier based on the facilities that exist within the immediate proximity. By always using a simple classifier, adaptive-PAC has the potential to drastically reduce the average classification complexity for PAC-aided PDR systems. Using experimental data, we quantify and compare the performance of the proposed adaptive-PAC against the conventional PAC. We find that for typical shopping centers, adaptive-PAC reduces classification complexity by 91–97% without any degradation in classification accuracy rates.