Cost-efficient BLE fingerprint database construction approach via multi-quadric RBF interpolation

The demand for indoor localization is becoming urgent, but the traditional location fingerprint approach takes a lot of manpower and time to construct a fine-grained location fingerprint database. To address this problem, we propose to use the approach of combining dynamic collection of fingerprint samples with Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation. Specifically, the raw sparse fingerprint database is constructed from a small number of fingerprints collected on a few paths, in which the pedestrian track correction algorithm improves the validity and accuracy of the sparse fingerprint database. Then, the RBF interpolation approach is applied to enrich the sparse fingerprint database, in which the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the free shape parameter and the cut-off radius is determined according to the experimental results. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach guarantees high interpolation and localization accuracy and also significantly reduces the effort of manual collection of fingerprint samples.