See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/269519806

Activity Sequence-Based Indoor Pedestrian Localization Using Smartphones

Article  in  IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems · December 2014

DOI: 10.1109/THMS.2014.2368092

CITATIONS READS
105 740

5 authors, including:

Baoding Zhou Qingquan Li

Shenzhen University Shenzhen University
37 PUBLICATIONS   697 CITATIONS    415 PUBLICATIONS   9,476 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Qingzhou Mao Wei Tu

Wuhan University Shenzhen University
47 PUBLICATIONS   1,363 CITATIONS    92 PUBLICATIONS   1,601 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

HeatExpo View project

People-oriented GIS approach for studying human dynamics,human mobilities and creating smart navigation service View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Qingzhou Mao on 16 December 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Activity Sequence-Based Indoor Pedestrian
Localization Using Smartphones
Baoding Zhou, Student Member, IEEE, Qingquan Li, Qingzhou Mao, Member, IEEE, Wei Tu, Member, IEEE,
and Xing Zhang
Abstract—This paper presents an activity sequence-based in-
door pedestrian localization approach using smartphones. The ac-
tivity sequence consists of several continuous activities during the
walking process, such as turning at a corner, taking the eleva-
tor, taking the escalator, and walking stairs. These activities take
place when a user walks at some special points in the building,
like corners, elevators, escalators, and stairs. The special points
form an indoor road network. In our approach, we first detect
the user’s activities using the built-in sensors in a smartphone. The
detected activities constitute the activity sequence. Meanwhile, the
user’s trajectory is reckoned by Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR).
Based on the detected activity sequence and reckoned trajectory,
we realize pedestrian localization by matching them to the indoor
road network using a Hidden Markov Model. After encountering
several special points, the location of the user would converge on the
true one. We evaluate our proposed approach using smartphones
in two buildings: an office building and a shopping mall. The re-
sults show that the proposed approach can realize autonomous
pedestrian localization even without knowing the initial point in
the environments. The mean offline localization error is about
1.3 m. The results also demonstrate that the proposed approach
is robust to activity detection error and PDR estimation error.
Index Terms—Activity sequence, hidden Markov model (HMM),
indoor localization, smartphone.
I. INTRODUCTION
HILE outdoor localization via global positioning system
W (GPS) is widely used, indoor localization remains a
challenge due to the limited visibility of GPS satellites. People
spend the majority of time indoors [1], which enables indoor
pedestrian localization to become a key technique in location-
based services.
Manuscript received January 20, 2014; revised September 14, 2014;
accepted November 1, 2014. This work was supported by Shenzhen
Dedicated Funding of Strategic Emerging Industry Development Program
(JCYJ20121019111128765), Shenzhen Scientific Research and Development
Funding Program (ZDSY20121019111146499, JSGG20121026111056204,
JCYJ20120817163755063, JCYJ20140418095735587), Major State Basic Re-
search Development Program (2010CB732100), National Natural Science
Foundation of China (41201483, 41301511, 41401444), China Postdoctoral Sci-
ence Foundation (2013M542199, 2014M560671), Navinfo Innovation Funding
Program. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor D. Monekosso.
(Corresponding author: Q. Li and Q. Mao)
B. Zhou, Q. Li, and Q. Mao are with the Department of State Key Labora-
tory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing,
Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China (e-mail: bdzhou@whu.edu.cn; qzh-
mao@whu.edu.cn).
Q. Li, W. Tu, and X. Zhang are with the Department of Shenzhen
Key Laboratory of Spatial Smart Sensing and Services, Shenzhen Univer-
sity, Shenzhen 518060, China (e-mail: liqq@szu.edu.cn; tuwei@szu.edu.cn;
xzhang@szu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/THMS.2014.2368092
2168-2291 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
Many indoor localization methods are based on wireless radio
facility, such as WiFi [2], radio-frequency identification (RFID)
[3], Bluetooth [4], and Ultrawide Band (UWB) [5]. These local-
ization methods can be categorized into two types: triangulation
and fingerprinting [6]. The former relies on installed expensive
hardware, making it neither scalable nor universal. The latter
requires pretraining, which is time-consuming.
In addition to wireless radio-based methods, dead reckoning
(DR) techniques relying on inertial sensors are another way for
indoor localization. These methods derive the current location
by adding the estimated displacement to the previous estimated
one. The biggest advantage of DR method is independence from
external infrastructure. DR techniques, widely used for pedes-
trian localization, known as Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR)
[7], leverage lightweight and inexpensive inertial sensors for
portable devices, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and mag-
netometers. The devices for PDR include wearable IMU [8],
tablet PC, and smartphone [9]. The principle of PDR is integrat-
ing inertial sensor measurements over time; therefore, its major
drawback is that even small errors in inertial sensors will be
magnified by integration [7].
Several solutions have been proposed to prevent the accumu-
lative errors of PDR [10]–[12]. One approach Activity-based
Map Matching (AMM) uses activity-related locations as virtual
landmarks to eliminate the accumulation of errors [11]–[13].
For example, when a user takes the elevator, there would be
an overweight/weightlessness moment and another subsequent
weightlessness/overweight moment. These two moments can
be detected by the accelerometer, and then, the location of the
elevator could be used as the virtual landmark. With the built-in
MEMS inertial sensors, smartphones can be considered as pri-
mary motion capture sensors, and human activity detection (AD)
algorithms based on smartphone have been proposed [14]–[21],
which makes AMM a promising method for pedestrian indoor
localization.
The AMM comprises two basic modules: AD and Map
Matching (MM) [22]. The function of the AD module is to
detect what a person is doing at a particular instant, such as
using an elevator, turning at a corner, or walking upstairs. The
MM module identifies the special point on the map where the
user is passing based on the detected activity and then matches
the estimated position of PDR to the location of the identified
special point. Both modules may cause errors. The AD may
miss detecting an activity when the activity actually takes place,
and it may confuse two different activities and incorrectly de-
tect one when actually the other has taken place. With respect to
MM, the exact location of the user in a large indoor environment
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
cannot be determined by the detected activity since there may
be more than one special point with the same activity feature.
Another neglected factor of the current AMM approaches is
the constraint imposed by the topology of the indoor map. For
example, a user cannot walk through a wall or other barriers
marked on the map.
In this paper, we propose a novel activity sequence-based
indoor pedestrian localization approach using smartphones.1
To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first that uses
activity sequence for indoor pedestrian localization. The ac-
tivity sequence consists of several consecutive activities when
the pedestrian passes the special points of a building. The ap-
proach realizes pedestrian localization by matching the activity
sequence to several special points using Hidden Markov Model
(HMM). The proposed approach can realize autonomous local-
ization based on PDR even without knowing the initial point.
The main contribution is to propose the activity sequence-based
map matching (ASMM) model and the ASMM model-based
localization approach that takes into account the inertial sensors
error and AD accuracy and is robust to a certain degree of error.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
reviews the related work. Section III presents the activity se-
quence detection method with an example activity sequence.
Section IV introduces the activity sequence-based localization
approach. Results and analysis are in Section V. Section VI dis-
cusses the proposed method. Section VII concludes the paper.
II. RELATED WORK
PDR has been applied in indoor localization [23]–[25], which
estimates position by accumulating length and heading of each
step. The major problem with PDR is that dead-reckoned trajec-
tory accuracy degrades rapidly over time [26]. Therefore, PDR
cannot be used on its own for long indoor trips. Some additional
mechanisms are required to recalibrate. These approaches can be
classified into three generic categories: infrastructure assisted,
AMM and indoor map assisted.
A. Infrastructure Assisted
GPS is one kind of common infrastructure for recalibrating
PDR. CompACC [10] triggers periodic GPS measurements to
recalibrate the user’s estimated location. Another localization
system using GPS as the means to recalibrate and validate the
PDR technology is proposed in [27]. However, GPS is unre-
liable indoors, making it inappropriate for indoor localization.
Another alternative approach uses radio frequency devices as
the infrastructure to recalibrate the PDR errors. The system pro-
posed in [28] uses RFID technology to recalibrate the PDR er-
rors by placing RFID tags in the environment. RFID technology
is also combined with inertial navigation system techniques for
accurate pedestrian indoor navigation in [29]. In [30], a system
that utilizes HMM to combine WiFi fingerprints localization
and DR is proposed. In [31], a constraint approach for PDR and
UWB fusion is proposed, which fuses the information of PDR
1 In this paper, indoor localization refers to localization in indoor public
spaces, such as office building and shopping mall.
and UWB using a constraint filter with an upper bound in the
distance between the estimated positions of both sensors.
The proposed infrastructure-assisted approaches for recali-
brating PDR can improve the positioning accuracy. However,
these solutions rely on infrastructure. Some infrastructure is
costly. Others, such as RFID and UWB, have not been in-
stalled on smartphones. WiFi fingerprinting is time-consuming
and would not work in an environment without WiFi.
B. Activity-Based Map Matching
An AMM method recalibrates a PDR system by monitoring
users’ activities and matching their activities to correspond-
ing specific points. In [11], an indoor positioning approach is
proposed based on a combination of Global Navigation Satel-
lite System where available, combining with PDR and AMM.
The matching method used in [11] is Nearest Object Matching
(NOM), which matches the current estimated location to the
nearest object. Inertial sensor features are used as virtual land-
marks to prevent accumulation of PDR errors in UnLoc [13].
The matching method in UnLoc is also based on NOM. An-
other pedestrian tracking system is proposed relying on AMM
in [32]. The proposed system uses HMM to estimate pedestrian
location and uses detected corners as landmarks to correct the
user’s location. In [32], when landmarks (corners) are detected,
the pedestrian location is updated with the information at the
most similar landmark. The similarity between landmarks and
current sensor data is determined based on the distance and
heading difference between each landmark and the current lo-
cation. The criteria of similarity would be invalid, if the sensor
error is too large or the distance between different landmarks is
too small. Furthermore, the proposed HMM in [32] treats the
current location as a hidden state, regarding magnetometer and
accelerometer data at the current location as observations. This
is different from our system, which uses HMM for activity MM.
Because of the sensor’s error, the nearest object is always not
the actual one. Therefore, these AMM approaches using NOM
as a matching method would encounter mismatch problems.
To analyze the mismatch probability of AMM in indoor posi-
tioning, a closed-form expression for mismatch probability as a
function of PDR sensor error and proximity between two facil-
ities is proposed in [22]. However, this paper only estimates the
mismatch probability for a given map and PDR error and does
not take into consideration the topology of the interior. Has-
san developed a performance model of PDR with activity-based
location updates in [33]. He demonstrated that the distance a
pedestrian is expected to travel before the PDR is recalibrated is
the reciprocal of the density of activity switching points in the
indoor environment [33].
ActionSLAM [34] is another approach to activity-based
pedestrian localization, which iteratively builds a map of the
environment using location-related actions (activities) as land-
marks and localizes the user within this map. ActionSLAM
is a novel Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)
method for pedestrian indoor tracking that makes use of body-
mounted sensors. ActionSLAM is extended in [35] by intro-
ducing heading drift compensation, stance detection adaptation,
and ellipse landmarks. The experiments show that the improved
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
ZHOU et al.: ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED INDOOR PEDESTRIAN LOCALIZATION USING SMARTPHONES
ActionSLAM is robust and capable of accurately tracking a
user in daily life. SmartActionSLAM [36], another extension of
ActionSLAM, uses the integrated motion sensors of the smart-
phone and an optional foot-mounted inertial measurement unit
to track a person. Similar to ActionSLAM, Grzonka et al.[37]
incrementally determines the trajectory of a person in a 3-D envi-
ronment based on motions and activities and is able to accurately
recover the trajectory of the person. SLAM technology has been
successfully used in real-time smartphone-based indoor naviga-
tion [38]. These SLAM-based approaches are different from
ours.
C. Indoor Map Assisted
In pedestrian localization system, the user’s trajectory is re-
stricted by the indoor map and brings opportunities for indoor
localization. One common method for localization based on map
information is MM, an effective means to improve the accuracy
of GPS [39], WiFi [40], and GSM [41] based localization. These
MM methods depend on the observations obtained from other
means, e.g., GPS, WiFi, and GSM. This is different from our
proposed approach, which uses AD as the observation.
Other approaches utilize the constraint imposed by the map
for independent indoor pedestrian localization. Woodman and
Harle proposed a localization approach based on MM using par-
ticle filter, which is entirely self-contained and does not rely on
infrastructure [42]. An indoor map-assisted pedestrian indoor
localization approach is proposed in [43], where the constraint
of the indoor map is used to filter out infeasible locations over
time. These indoor map-assisted localization approaches use the
topology of the map to restrict the pedestrian’s trajectory based
on particle filter. Particle filter-based approaches mainly utilize
indoor map information for localization. Differently, the pur-
pose of this study is to leverage AD information for pedestrian
localization.
III. ACTIVITY SEQUENCE
Activity sequence implies several consecutive activities when
a pedestrian passes the special points of a building, such as a cor-
ner, an elevator, an escalator, and a stair, where the pedestrian’s
activities are different from walking. These different activities
can be detected using AD techniques based on the readings of
the built-in sensors in a smartphone.
A. Activity Detection
Here, we restrict ourselves to structured environments such
as office buildings where there are many specific points where
pedestrians complete different activities. These activities can be
detected using the built-in sensors in smartphones [14]–[21].
In this paper, five types of activities are considered: turning
at a corner (normal turn), turning around (U-Turn), taking the
elevator, taking the escalator, and walking on the stairs. Some
activities only occur at the specific points, which are called
“location-related activity” (including turn,2 taking the elevator,
2 Generally, a turn would occur anywhere; in this paper, only the sharp turn
is considered, since it usually occurs at a corner.
3
taking the escalator, and walking stairs). Others would occur
anywhere, which are called “location-unrelated activity,” such
as U-Turn.
All activities can be detected by the built-in sensors of the
smartphone. Taking the elevator, taking the escalator, and walk-
ing on the stairs can be detected using the accelerometer and
barometer as pressure changes with altitude, and the accelera-
tion patterns of these activities are different. Normal turn and
U-Turn can be detected by the gyroscope and digital compass.
The decision tree for AD and signal features of each activity
is shown in Fig. 1. The top level classifies the activities into
walking and nonwalking based on the standard deviation of
acceleration (STD ACC). Walking activity includes walking on
the stairs (down and up) and walking normally (on flat ground).
Nonwalking activity includes taking the elevator (down and up),
taking the escalator (down and up), and keeping still. STD ACC
is calculated over a sliding window of size STDwin . A threshold
(STD TH) is used to categorize the activity: If STD ACC >
STD TH, the activity belongs to walking; otherwise, it belongs
to nonwalking. The STDwin is set to 0.8 s, and STD TH is set
to 0.5 [44].
The second level divides these two types of activities into
pressure changed activities and pressure unchanged activities
based on the pressure (Pre.) value measured by the barometer.
1) For walking activities, if the pressure changed, the activity
is detected as walking stairs (if the pressure increases, it
is walking downstairs; otherwise, it is walking upstairs).
Otherwise, it is walking normally.
2) For nonwalking activities, if the pressure changed, the
activity is detected as taking the elevator or taking the
escalator (if the pressure increases, it is down; otherwise,
it is up). To distinguish taking the elevator and taking the
escalator, the unique acceleration pattern of taking the el-
evator is used as the feature. The elevator pattern is caused
by the elevator usage, including an overweight period and
a weightless period (see Fig. 1). By detecting the over-
weight and weightless patterns, taking the elevator can be
differentiated from taking escalator [45]. If the pressure
does not change, the activity is detected as keeping still.
Keeping still is not considered in this paper.
During the walking process, turns are common activities,
including normal turn and U-Turn. Normal turn means turn at a
corner, and U-Turn means turn around. Fig. 2 shows the change
of the heading and angular velocity when a pedestrian makes
a normal turn and U-Turn. The heading value is measured by
the digital compass, and angular velocity is measured by the
gyroscope. The values of these two sensors change dramatically
at the corner. In this paper, the angular velocity measured by
gyroscope is used for turn detection, and the heading value
measured by digital compass is used to differentiate normal
turn or U-Turn.
When a pedestrian turns, the turning axis is along the direc-
tion of gravity. Hence, angular velocity around the direction of
gravity will be generated, detected by the gyroscope. Generally,
the acceleration generated when a pedestrian walks normally
is much less than gravity. Therefore, the angular velocity of
the direction of maximum acceleration can be used to reflect
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Fig. 1. Decision tree for AD and signal feature (acceleration and pressure) of each activity.
Fig. 2. Change of heading and angular velocity when a pedestrian makes turn
and U-Turn.
that of the direction of gravity.3 The direction of the maximum
acceleration can be obtained by the following equation [32]:
axism ax = arg max(accx , accy , accz )
where axism ax is the axis of the maximum acceleration, accx ,
accy , and accz are namely the acceleration of x-, y-, and z-axis.
Turn is detected using the peak detection algorithm proposed
in [46], and the threshold is set to 50 in this paper. The peak
detection algorithm is used to find the local maximum or mini-
mum during a period of time [46]. The impact of the threshold
to the turn detection result is detailed in [32].
When a turn is detected, there are two possibilities: normal
turn and U-turn. The difference between normal turn and U-Turn
is the heading change value (see Fig. 2). Therefore, the heading
3 If the angular velocity around direction of gravity was used to calculate
the heading change magnitude, the angular velocity measured of the direc-
tion of maximum acceleration should be transformed from local coordinate to
global coordinate system by multiplying the rotation matrix. However, during
our experiments, we detect normal turn and U-Turn using the peak detection
algorithm to find the maximum angular velocity rather than using the heading
change magnitude. Therefore, we did not use the coordinate transformation.
change measured by the digital compass is used to distinguish
these two activities:

(normal) Turn, if ΔH < H T H
(2)
U-Turn, otherwise
where ΔH = abs(mean(H(T − twin : T )) − mean(H(T :
T + twin ))), H is the heading measured by the digital compass,
T is the turning moment, twin is the time window, which is
set to 1.5, mean(H(T − twin : T )) is the average heading
value between T − twin and T , H T H is the threshold for
distinguish normal turn (called turn) and U-Turn, which is set
to 135◦ based on the experiments.
B. Example of Activity Sequence
An activity sequence consists of several activities in chrono-
logical order. These activities can be detected by the smartphone
carried with the pedestrian. An example activity sequence is
shown in Fig. 3. To eliminate the influence of the noise caused
by the jitter of the human body, a Butterworth filter of order 4
(1) is used, with a cutoff frequency of 10 Hz. In Fig. 3, the activity
sequence includes seven turns, walking down the stair, taking
the elevator up, and a U-turn. Based on the detected activities,
the pedestrian’s position can be determined by matching these
activities to the corresponding special points.
IV. ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED LOCALIZATION
To eliminate the accumulation of PDR errors, the proposed
approach utilizes MM method to find the most likely sequence
of special points based on the detected activity sequence. The
HMM is used as the MM algorithm. We next introduce PDR
and the definition of Indoor Road Network.
A. Pedestrian Dead Reckoning
PDR is a pedestrian localization scheme that derives the cur-
rent location by adding the estimated displacement to the pre-
vious one. The displacement is obtained from the information
of step count and heading. If the previous location is (x, y), the
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
ZHOU et al.: ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED INDOOR PEDESTRIAN LOCALIZATION USING SMARTPHONES
Fig. 3. Example of an activity sequence.
Fig. 4. Step detection result.
next location is calculated as
(x + sl · sc · cos(h), y + sl · sc · sin(h))
where sl stands for the step length, sc the step count, and h the
heading. Step count is obtained by the peak detection algorithm
in [46]. Before peak detection, the raw acceleration data should
be preprocessed to filter out irrelevant data. For filtering, a But-
terworth low pass of order 4 is used, with a cutoff frequency of
10 Hz [46]. The step detection result is shown in Fig. 4. The
heading is measured by the compass in the smartphone. The
step length is set to a default value added with a random error
[30], [43].
B. Indoor Road Network
In this paper, each special point where the pedestrian would
execute different activities other than walking is defined as the
5
Fig. 5. Node example in the indoor road network.
node. An indoor road network consists of all nodes. The nodes in
an office building mainly include corners, elevators, escalators,
and stairs. The node attribute is defined as follows:
1) coordinate, coordinate of the node;
(3) 2) neighbor nodes;
3) accessible direction (AD);
4) accessible distance of corresponding accessible direction
(ADCAD);
5) node type (NT).
Fig. 5 is an example of the node; the attribute of node 2 is
(x2 , y2 ); {1, 3}; {E, S, W, N }; {dE , dS , dW , dN }; Corner.
C. Hidden Markov Model
HMM is used to match the activity sequence to the special
points of the indoor map, that is, the node of the Indoor Road
Network (called node). In this section, we introduce HMM for
activity sequence-based localization. The HMM is represented
by a finite set of states, each of which is associated with a prob-
ability distribution. Transitions among the states are determined
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Fig. 6. Example of indoor road network and corresponding transition
probabilities.
by a set of transition probabilities. In a specific state, an outcome
or observation can be generated by the associated probability
distribution. The state is not directly observable to an external
observer [47].
An HMM can be represented as λ = (S, V, A, B, π), where
1) S = (S1 , S2 , . . . , SN ) is the set of possible states, N is
the number of states in the model;
2) V = (v1 , v2 , . . . , vM ) is the set of observations from the
model, M is the number of distinct observation symbols
per state;
3) A = {aij } is the state transition probability distribution,
aij = pr {qt+1 = Sj |qt = Si } , 1 ≤ i, j ≤ N , where qt
denotes the state at time t;
4) B = {bj (k)} is the observation probability distribution
in each of the states, bj (k) = pr {vk at t|qt = Sj } , 1 ≤
j ≤ N, 1 ≤ k ≤ M ;
5) π = {πi } is the initial state distribution, πi =
pr {q1 = Si } , 1 ≤ i ≤ N .
Therefore, under a sequence of observations O =
(O1 , O2 , . . . , OT ) where each observation Oi ∈ V, 1 ≤ i ≤ T
and T is a system parameter, we want to find the most proba-
ble sequence of states Q = (q1 , q2 , . . . , qT ), where qi ∈ S, 1 ≤
i ≤ T.
We present our HMM as follows:
1) Hidden States: The hidden states in our HMM are nodes
of the Indoor Road Networks. The node is defined as the special
points that would make pedestrian complete different activities
other than walking. The node attribute includes coordinate and
type, such as corner and elevator.
2) Observations: There are two observations in our HMM.
The first is the displacement traveled during two consecutive
activity moments. The second is the AD result using the AD
algorithm.
3) Transition Probabilities: A transition between hidden
states is signaled when an activity is detected. To estimate the
transition matrix, the indoor road network structure is utilized.
Since a pedestrian can only move between adjacent nodes, and
each state represents a node, the transition probability is as-
sumed to be uniform over all neighbors of a given node. An
example for transition probability estimation is in Fig. 6.
4) Emission Probabilities: The emission probability de-
scribes the observation probability distribution at each hidden
state. Due to the two observations in our HMM, namely posi-
tion and activity type, the emission probability consists of two
parts: position emission probability and activity type emission
Fig. 7. Schematic diagram for position emission probability estimation.
probability. As these two observations are independent, the
emission probability can be defined as
p (zt , mt |ri ) = p (zt |ri ) · p (mt |ri ) (4)
where p (zt |ri ) is the position emission probability, which de-
scribes the probability distribution of position observation in a
specific hidden state. p (mt |ri ) is the activity detection emis-
sion probability, which describes the probability distribution of
an activity type given a specific hidden state.
According to the principle of PDR, position error is produced
by distance estimation error and angle estimation error. There-
fore, p (zt |ri ) is made up of two parts: distance observation
probability distribution and angle observation probability dis-
tribution. Here, these two probability distributions are assumed
to be Gaussian distributions [30], [43]. Since distance measure-
ment and angle measurement are independent, the observation
probability distribution is defined as
1 − 1 2 (d t −d i ) 2
p (zt |ri ) = p (dt |di ) · p (φt |φi ) = √ e 2σ d
2πσd
1 − 2 (φ t −φ i )
1 2
·√
2σ
e φ . (5)
2πσφ
Here, σd is the standard deviation of the measured distance,
and σφ is the standard deviation of the measured angle. Based
on the distance calculation method of PDR, the distance is in
direct proportion to step length; therefore, σd is equal to the
standard deviation of step length. dt is the distance between
observation and the last matched (determined) state. di is the
distance between the i-th state and the last matched (determined)
state. φt is the intersection angle between dt and di , as shown
in Fig. 7.
p (mt |ri ) describes the probability of correct AD for a given
hidden state, which is also known as AD confusion matrix.
5) Initial State Distribution: When the first activity is de-
tected, based on the activity type, the initial state distribution
is uniform in all candidate nodes. If the start point is unknown,
the candidate nodes are the nodes with the same type in the
environment; otherwise, the candidate nodes are selected from
the neighboring nodes of the start point.
6) Viterbi Algorithm: The Viterbi algorithm is adopted
to search for the most probable sequence of hidden states
Q = (q1 , q2 , . . . , qT ) for the given observation sequence O =
(O1 , O2 , . . . , OT ), a Viterbi variable is defined as
 
δt+1 (j) = max (δt (i) · aij ) · bj (Ot+1 ) , 1 ≤ t ≤ T (6)
i
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

ZHOU et al.: ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED INDOOR PEDESTRIAN LOCALIZATION USING SMARTPHONES 7

where δt (j) is the highest probability along a single path, at

Algorithm 1: System
state t, aij is the state transition probability from i to j, and
input: Indoor Road Network of the building: IRN
bj (Ot+1 ) is the observation probability at state j. To get the
most probable state, ϕt+1 (j) is defined as input: Sensor readings up to current time t: d1:t
output: The activity sequence consisted of all detected
δt+1 (j) = arg max (δt (i) · aij ), 1 ≤ t ≤ T (7) activities: ActivitySequence.
output: The key point chain consisted of all chain
D. Localization Scheme candidates: P ointChain.
Given the detected activity sequence, our approach aims to definition: nchain =number of chain candidates in the
find all nodes where the user completes the activities in the P ointChain
activity sequence. The nodes are named “Node Chain” corre- definition: nactiv ity =number of location related activities
sponding to the detected activity sequence. During the process in the ActivitySequence
of the proposed HMM algorithm, if the number of states is too 1: Γ=detectCurrentActivities(d1:t )
small, the Node Chain with the highest probability is not always 2: if stepActivity ∈ Γ then
the correct one. Therefore, we adopt a novel method by calcu- 3: (Δx, Δy)=estimatePositionChangeAfterLastActivity
lating the probability of every NodeChain candidate using the (dt )
following equation modified from (6): 4: DistanceTraveledAfterLastActivity=Δx, Δy
pt+1 (j) = pt (i) · aij · bj (Ot+1 ) , 1 ≤ t ≤ T (8) 5: DT ALA=DistanceTraveledAfterLastActivity //for
better readability
where pt (j) is the probability of a NodeChain candidate at state
6: CurrentHeading=avg(heading(tlastA citiv ity : t)))
t. We adopt the following criteria to select the correct NodeChain
7: CH=CurrentHeading //for better readability
from the candidates:
8: if nactiv ity > 0 then
phighest /psecondhighest = C (9) 9: for i=1:nchain do
where phighest means the highest probability of the NodeChain 10: if DT ALA · c > ADCAD || CH = AD
candidate, psecondhighest means the second highest probability, then
and C is a constant, set to 4 herein. 11: delete P ointChain(i)
After the correct NodeChain is determined by (9), the user’s 12: end if
location is determined by matching the estimation location 13: end for
of each activity in the activity sequence to the determined 14: end if
NodeChain. The subsequent location can be derived by PDR 15: end if
using the determined node as the starting point. The bias of the 16: if location_related_activity ∈ Γ then
smartphone sensors can be inferred from the previous localiza- 17: AT =ActivityType //for better readability
tion process. The step length of the user can be estimated by the
18: if nactiv ity == 1 then //first detect activity
detected step number and the distance between the nodes of the
19: point_candidate=getInitialPoint(DT ALA, CH,
determined NodeChain.
AT )
To estimate the user’s location during the walking process
(online localization), (10) is used 20: pr_point_candidate=calculatePointCandidate
Probabilities

N
21: addPointtoPointChain(point_candidate,pr_point_
pest = (pi · pri ) (10)
candidate)
i=1
22: else //detect more than one activity
where pest is the position estimated by the proposed scheme, 23: for i=1:nchain do
pi is the position estimated by every NodeChain candidate, pri
24: Neightbors_of_last_points=getNeighbors
is the probability of each NodeChain candidate, and N is the
(PointChain{i})
number of the NodeChain candidates.
25: for j=1:length(Neighbors) do
E. System 26: pr_Neightbors=calculateNeighbor
Probabilities(IRN ,d1:t )
Our approach is summarized with the pseudocode in Algo- 27: addNeighbortoPointChain(Neightbors,
rithm 1. Given the indoor road network and the sensor readings, pr_Neightbors)
we first detect the current activity using the AD approach (see 28: end for
line 1). If the activity is a step, we update the position changed
29: end for
after the last activity and calculate the distance traveled after the
30: end if
last activity. The current heading is estimated by averaging the
heading data from the detection moment of the last activity and 31: end if
current moment. Based on the distance between the last activity
and current heading, the point chain is updated according to the
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
TABLE I
CONFUSION MATRIX OF AD
Turn U-Turn Elevator Stair Escalator
Turn 100% 0 0 0 0
U-Turn 0 100% 0 0 0
Elevator 0 0 100% 0 0
Stair 0 0 0 100% 0
Escalator 0 0 0 0 100%
constraint of indoor road networks. If the DTALA is greater than
the ADCAD of the last node (a constant c is used as tolerance
for the PDR error, which is set to 0.5 here), or the CH is not
equal to the AD of the last node, the NodeChain candidate is
deleted (see lines 2–15). As per Section IV-C, if the location
related activity is detected, and the activity is the first detected
one, the initial node candidates would be obtained based on the
DTALA, CH, and AT. The probability of each node is calcu-
lated as per Section IV-C5). Then, the node candidates with the
probabilities are added to the NodeChain (see lines 16–21). If
the activity is not the first detected one, the neighbors of the tail
of each chain candidate (last node added when last activity is
detected) in the NodeChain is obtained as per Section IV-C5).
The probability of each neighbor of the last node is calculated
as per Section IV-C6). Similarly, the point candidates with the
probabilities are added to the NodeChain (see lines 22–27).
V. EVALUATION
A. Activity Detection Performance Proof of Concept
To evaluate the AD method, a pilot study is conducted. All
data were collected using an Android version 4.1.1 Galaxy III
smartphone, including accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetome-
ter, and barometer data. The sampling frequency was set to
100 Hz during data collection. Four participants (two females
and two males) were asked to complete five activities, accord-
ing to [18]. Each participant held the smartphone in a hand in
front of the body. The sample size of each activity was 20 traces
for each activity. For Turn and U-Turn, participants first walked
about ten steps, made a turn (U-Turn), and then walked another
ten steps. For the elevator, stairs, and escalator, data collection
began and ended at two end points of the activity. For the eleva-
tor, we collected data for different floors (first floor to the 14th
floor), since elevators are stopped by other users in the building.
The AD accuracy is calculated using the following equation:
Ti
Accuracy = · 100%
Ni
where Ti is the number of the activities that were correctly
detected of the i-th-type activities, Ni is the number of all the
i-th-type activities.
The AD result is shown in Table I. The activity method for
a natural track of one participant is shown in Fig. 3. The result
shows that the activities can be detected accurately based on the
proposed AD approach using a smartphone.
Fig. 8. Experiment environments. (a) Office building. (b) Shopping mall.
B. Activity Sequence-Based Localization
1) Experiment Setup: To evaluate the overall system perfor-
mance in real-world environments, we performed experiments
in two buildings: an office building, with a 52.5 m × 52.5 m
floor plan, and a shopping mall, with a 80 m × 60 m floor plan,
as shown in Fig. 8. The proposed system was implemented on
the Android platform using the Galaxy S III smartphone, with
an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, and a barome-
ter. The participants were asked to walk along six representative
routes at constant speed with the smartphone in the hand. Each
route was repeated ten times by four participants (two males and
two females). Route #1, Route #2, Route #3, and Route #4 are in
the office building; Route #5 and Route #6 are in the shopping
mall:
1) Route #1 starts from an arbitrary position of the corridor,
passes several corners, and arrives at one seat in the office.
In this case, the start point is unknown. The traditional
PDR scheme cannot work in this case.
2) Route #2 starts from a stair and passes an open area around
the elevator. Route #2 includes an open area, where the
constraint is poor.
3) Route #3 starts from an elevator and includes a U-Turn
activity. It is used to verify the impact of location unrelated
activity.
4) Route #4 starts with waking the elevator up to the floor of
an office, walking to the office, sitting down for a period
of time, and walking to the wash basin.
5) Route #5 and Route #6 are two long routes in the shopping
mall: Route #5 starts from an elevator and Route #6 from
an escalator.
To collect ground truth data, some markers with known coor-
dinates were set along with the routes. When a user walks past a
marker, another participant would record the time using another
smartphone, which is synchronized with the smartphone used as
(11)
localization device. Between two markers (the distance is about
10 m), the ground truth is obtained by interpolating using step
count.
The online localization error is obtained by calculating the Eu-
clidean distance between the estimated position and the ground
truth. For offline localization, the error is calculated as follows:
N
|pei , pg i |
Error = i=1 (12)
N
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
ZHOU et al.: ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED INDOOR PEDESTRIAN LOCALIZATION USING SMARTPHONES
Fig. 9. Online localization error results for each route. (a) Route #1. (b) Route #2. (c) Route #3. (d) Route #4. (e) Route #5. (f) Route #6.
where N is the number of the ground truth, pei is the i-th
estimated position, pg i is the position of the of the i-th ground
truth, |pei , pg i | is the Euclidean distance of pei and pg i .
The standard deviation of step length estimation σd is set
to 0.1. The standard deviation of measured heading σφ is set
to 10◦ .
2) Online Localization Performance: Online localization re-
sults of all routes are shown in Fig. 9 for the proposed approach,
the proposed approach with known initial point, and the pro-
posed approach with known initial activity. Without initial ac-
tivity, at the beginning, the average error is high. This is because
the initial location is unknown, and the initial position is as-
sumed as a uniform distribution. With increasing step number,
the localization error decreases gradually. As the number of en-
countered activities also increases, after passing a number of
steps, the NodeChain consists of the passed nodes determined
by the proposed approach (except Route #3), and the location is
also determined. For Route #3, if the initial activity is unknown,
the trace cannot be determined because the number of activi-
ties is insufficient; Fig. 8 shows there are only three turns in
Route #3.
If the initial activity is known, the localization error decreases
faster, as seen in Fig. 9 (there is no initial activity in Route #1).
For example, for Route #2, if the initial activity is unknown, the
localization error decreases after about 40 steps; if the initial
activity is known, it only needs about ten steps for localization
error decreasing. This is because the initial activity is special,
in Route #2, it is taking the stairs; in Route #3, #4, and #5, it is
taking the elevator; in Route #6, it is taking the escalator. The
number of these three activity-related nodes is much smaller
9
than that of the turn. From Fig. 9(f), the location is immedi-
ately determined when the initial activity is detected. This is
because there is only one up escalator in the shopping mall.
Using the special activity-related nodes would help to improve
the convergence speed. The fewer the number of activity-related
nodes, the faster is the convergence speed. If the initial point is
known, based on the AD result, the accumulative error can be
eliminated by matching the estimated position of the PDR to the
corresponding activity point.
There are some special cases in the routes. In Route #2, there
is an open area, where turns cannot be detected. In Route #3,
there is a U-Turn activity, which is location-unrelated. In Route
#4, there is a period of sitting still. The results in Fig. 9 reveal
that these cases were addressed.
3) Convergence: Distance traveled before converging to a
unique activity chain reflects the convergence speed. The greater
the traveled distance, the slower is the convergence speed.
Fig. 10 shows the distance traveled of the different routes
until the algorithm converges, with and without initial activ-
ity. Mostly, with initial activity, the traveled distance is much
shorter than without initial activity. Fig. 10 shows that by using
AD information, the converge speed on the true location would
increase.
4) Performance Versus Activity Detection Accuracy: To an-
alyze the influence of AD accuracy and inertial sensor error
to the activity sequence matching result, Route #2 is taken as
an example. In Route #2, there are seven activities, including
walking upstairs, and six turns. We suppose that walking up-
stairs would not be detected accurately. In fact, if the barometer
is not used (there is no built-in barometer in some smartphones),
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
10
Fig. 10. Distance traveled before converging to unique activity chain. Route
#1 does not include initial activity, ∞ means Route #3 cannot be converged,
0 means Route #6 can be immediately converged when the initial activity is
detected.
Fig. 11. Matching accuracy as a function of AD accuracy. (a) Step length
error. (b) Heading error.
it would be difficult to distinguish walking stairs from walking
normally. Fig. 11 shows the activity sequence matching result
as a function of activity (walking upstairs) detection accuracy
with different inertial sensors error, expressed by the standard
deviation of step length and heading. The matching accuracy is
calculated after passing four activities.
From Fig. 11(a), when step length estimation error is small,
the matching accuracy is not influenced by the AD accuracy.
When σd = 0.1, the matching accuracy is near 100, and the AD
accuracy is 0. With increases in step length estimation error, the
influence of AD accuracy to the matching result is enhanced
greatly. The same trend is shown in Fig. 11(b), reflecting the
influence of heading error. If the sensor error is small, the activity
sequence can match the point well only using turning activity.
If the sensor error is large, without the walking upstairs activity,
the matching accuracy is low. Fig. 11 shows that activity with
a high degree of uniqueness (walking upstairs) is beneficial to
activity sequence matching.
From Fig. 11, the proposed approach is robust to a certain
degree of inertial sensors and AD error. From Fig. 11(a), if the
AD accuracy is 100%, the matching accuracy is more than 60%
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
when the standard deviation of step length estimation changes
from 0.1 to 0.5. As a result of AD error, if σd = 0.1, the match-
ing accuracy is near 100% even if the AD accuracy is 0. The
influence of heading error and AD accuracy on matching accu-
racy is similar to that of step length error, which can be seen
from Fig. 11(b).
5) Offline Localization (Tracking) Performance: The offline
localization result is obtained by matching the activity posi-
tion to the NodeChain determined by the proposed approach in
Section IV. If the initial position is unknown (Route #1), the
trace before first activity is derived retrospectively from the po-
sition of the first activity. The tracking trajectory is shown in
Fig. 12. The proposed approach tracked pedestrian’s trajectory
accurately in the experiment environments. The outcome of the
experiments is summarized in Table II (tracking error is the
mean of ten trials), and the mean location error of the offline
localization is about 1.3 m.
VI. DISCUSSION
In contrast with our study, WiFi fingerprinting-based localiza-
tion requires precalibration of the fingerprints, which is labor-
intensive and time-consuming [2], [6]. Although autonomous
fingerprinting construction approaches are proposed [48], the
localization performance based on the autonomous constructed
fingerprints is poor. Moreover, WiFi fingerprinting-based ap-
proaches rely on WiFi access points. Our approach does not rely
on any infrastructure, which can realize autonomous pedestrian
localization.
We discuss our approach as compared with two state-of-the-
art calibration-free localization systems: UnLoc [13] and Zee
[43]. UnLoc [13] proposed the idea to use inertial sensor fea-
tures as virtual landmarks to prevent accumulation of PDR er-
rors. However, UnLoc does not consider the ambiguity of the
virtual landmark; if there are more than one virtual landmark
with the same inertial feature, UnLoc would encounter the mis-
matching problem. Our proposed approach can avoid the mis-
matching problem by using the ASMM model. Zee [43] is an
indoor map-assisted localization approach which leverages the
topology of the map to restrict pedestrian’s trajectory based on a
particle filter. However, it is known that particle filtering is time-
consuming, which may be not suitable for online localization
based on a smartphone.
A. Limitations
The proposed approach is based on the assumption that all
location-related activities take place at the nodes of the indoor
road network. All the nodes are labeled with coordinates. Only
the labeled nodes are considered during the localization pro-
cess. Actually, some activities may take place away from la-
beled nodes. Our system detects the activity but cannot correctly
match the location. This is a limitation of this study, and we are
currently investigating methods to address it.
The proposed approach works well for structured indoor en-
vironments. In these buildings, there are many specific points
where pedestrians would complete different activities. More-
over, the pedestrian’s trajectory is restricted by the indoor road
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

ZHOU et al.: ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED INDOOR PEDESTRIAN LOCALIZATION USING SMARTPHONES 11

Fig. 12. Offline localization results. (a) Route #1. (b) Route #2. (c) Route #3. (d) Route #4. (e) Route #5. (f) Route #6.

TABLE II
EVALUATION RESULTS

Activity No.

Route No. Route Length (m) Detected Undetected Location-unrelated Tracking Error (m)

1 124.50 6 0 0 0.932
2 106.70 6 2 0 1.123
3 73.25 5 0 1 1.012
4 84.18 13 0 1 1.235
5 161.40 7 0 0 1.897
6 104.50 6 0 0 1.581

network in these buildings. The future work needs to address ACKNOWLEDGMENT

pedestrian localization in open indoor spaces (e.g., lobby).
In this paper, step length and heading errors are assumed to
be Gaussian distributions [30], [43]. A more realistic PDR error
model should be considered.
VII. CONCLUSION
This paper proposed a novel activity sequence-based pedes-
trian indoor localization approach using smartphones. The
activity sequence is first detected using an AD algorithm. Then,
the HMM is used to match the activities in the activity se-
quence to the corresponding nodes of the indoor road network.
During the matching process, the constraint of the indoor road
network is also taken into account. By the activity sequence-
based MM, the proposed approach can realize pedestrian local-
ization even without knowing the starting point in the structured
environments. The performance of the proposed approach has
been evaluated by experiments in two structured indoor envi-
ronments. The results show that the proposed pedestrian indoor
localization approach can work in these environments using
smartphones.
The authors would like to thank Danli Li, the editors and the
anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
REFERENCES
[1] Y. Chon, E. Talipov, and H. Cha, “Autonomous management of everyday
places for a personalized location provider,” IEEE Trans. Syst., Man,
Cybern., C, Appl. Rev., vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 518–531, Jul. 2012.
[2] P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan, “Radar: An in-building RF-based user lo-
cation and tracking system,” in Proc. 9th Annu. Joint Conf. IEEE Comput.
Commun. Soc., 2000, vol. 2, pp. 775–784.
[3] L. M. Ni, Y. Liu, Y. C. Lau, and A. P. Patil, “Landmarc: Indoor location
sensing using active RFID,” Wireless Netw., vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 701–710,
2004.
[4] A. Kotanen, M. Hannikainen, H. Leppakoski, and T. D. Hamalainen,
“Experiments on local positioning with bluetooth,” in Proc. Int.
Conf. Inf. Technol., Coding Comput. [Comput. Commun.]., 2003,
pp. 297–303.
[5] R. J. Fontana and S. J. Gunderson, “Ultra-wideband precision asset lo-
cation system,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Ultra Wideband Syst. Technol. Dig.
Papers, 2002, pp. 147–150.
[6] H. Liu, H. Darabi, P. Banerjee, and J. Liu, “Survey of wireless indoor
positioning techniques and systems,” IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., C,
Appl. Rev., vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1067–1080, Nov. 2007.
[7] S. Beauregard and H. Haas, “Pedestrian dead reckoning: A basis for per-
sonal positioning,” in Proc. 3rd Workshop Positioning, Navigat. Commun.,
2006, pp. 27–35.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
12
[8] J. Bird and D. Arden, “Indoor navigation with foot-mounted strapdown
inertial navigation and magnetic sensors [emerging opportunities for lo-
calization and tracking],” Wireless Commun., vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 28–35,
2011.
[9] A. R. Pratama, R. Hidayat et al., “Smartphone-based pedestrian dead
reckoning as an indoor positioning system,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Syst. Eng.
Technol., 2012, pp. 1–6.
[10] I. Constandache, R. R. Choudhury, and I. Rhee, “Towards mobile phone
localization without war-driving,” in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2010,
pp. 1–9.
[11] D. Gusenbauer, C. Isert, and J. Krosche, “Self-contained indoor position-
ing on off-the-shelf mobile devices,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Indoor Positioning
Indoor Navigat., 2010, pp. 1–9.
[12] J. A. B. Link, P. Smith, N. Viol, and K. Wehrle, “Footpath: Accurate map-
based indoor navigation using smartphones,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Indoor
Positioning Indoor Navigat., 2011, pp. 1–8.
[13] H. Wang, S. Sen, A. Elgohary, M. Farid, M. Youssef, and R. R. Choudhury,
“No need to war-drive: Unsupervised indoor localization,” in Proc. 10th
Int. Conf. Mobile Syst., Appl. Services, 2012, pp. 197–210.
[14] J. R. Kwapisz, G. M. Weiss, and S. A. Moore, “Activity recognition
using cell phone accelerometers,” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newslett.,
vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 74–82, 2011.
[15] T. Brezmes, J.-L. Gorricho, and J. Cotrina, “Activity recognition from
accelerometer data on a mobile phone,” in Distributed Computing, Arti-
ficial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Soft Computing, and Ambient Assisted
Living. New York, NY. USA: Springer, 2009, pp. 796–799.
[16] N. Győrbı́ró, Á. Fábián, and G. Hományi, “An activity recognition system
for mobile phones,” Mobile Netw. Appl., vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 82–91, 2009.
[17] K. Ouchi and M. Doi, “Indoor-outdoor activity recognition by a smart-
phone,” in Proc. ACM Conf. Ubiquitous Comput., 2012, pp. 600–601.
[18] S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Adaptive pedestrian activ-
ity classification for indoor dead reckoning systems,” in Proc. Int. Conf.
Indoor Positioning Indoor Navigat., 2013, pp. 1–7.
[19] S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Feature selection for floor-
changing activity recognition in multi-floor pedestrian navigation,” in
Proc. 7th Int. Mobile Comput. Ubiquitous Netw., 2014, pp. 1–6.
[20] L. Pei, R. Guinness, R. Chen, J. Liu, H. Kuusniemi, Y. Chen, L. Chen,
and J. Kaistinen, “Human behavior cognition using smartphone sensors,”
Sensors, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1402–1424, 2013.
[21] G. Panahandeh, N. Mohammadiha, A. Leijon, and P. Händel, “Continu-
ous hidden Markov model for pedestrian activity classification and gait
analysis,” IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 62, no. 5, pp. 1073–1083,
May 2013.
[22] S. Khalifa and M. Hassan, “Evaluating mismatch probability of activity-
based map matching in indoor positioning,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Indoor
Positioning Indoor Navigat., 2012, pp. 1–9.
[23] D. Alvarez, R. C. González, A. López, and J. C. Alvarez, “Comparison
of step length estimators from weareable accelerometer devices,” in Proc.
28th Annu. Int. Conf. Eng. Med. Biol. Soc., 2006, pp. 5964–5967.
[24] Y. Jin, H.-S. Toh, W.-S. Soh, and W.-C. Wong, “A robust dead-reckoning
pedestrian tracking system with low cost sensors,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf.
Pervasive Comput. Commun., 2011, pp. 222–230.
[25] U. Steinhoff and B. Schiele, “Dead reckoning from the pocket-an exper-
imental study,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Pervasive Comput. Commun.,
2010, pp. 162–170.
[26] R. Harle, “A survey of indoor inertial positioning systems for pedestrians,”
IEEE Commun. Surveys Tut., vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 1281–1293, Jul.–Sep.
2013.
[27] S. Beauregard, “A helmet-mounted pedestrian dead reckoning system,” in
Proc. 3rd Int. Forum Appl. Wearable Comput., 2006, pp. 1–11.
[28] S. House, S. Connell, I. Milligan, D. Austin, T. L. Hayes, and P. Chiang,
“Indoor localization using pedestrian dead reckoning updated with RFID-
based fiducials,” in Proc. Annu. Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc.,
2011, pp. 7598–7601.
[29] A. R. Jimenez Ruiz, F. Seco Granja, J. C. Prieto Honorato, and J. I. Guevara
Rosas, “Accurate pedestrian indoor navigation by tightly coupling foot-
mounted IMU and RFID measurements,” IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas.,
vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 178–189, Jan. 2012.
[30] J. Seitz, T. Vaupel, S. Meyer, J. G. Boronat, and J. Thielecke, “A hidden
Markov model for pedestrian navigation,” in Proc. 7th Workshop Posi-
tioning Navigat. Commun., 2010, pp. 120–127.
[31] F. Zampella, A. De Angelis, I. Skog, D. Zachariah, and A. Jimenez, “A
constraint approach for UWB and PDR fusion,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Indoor
Positioning Indoor Navigat., 2012, pp. 1–9.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
[32] K. Park, H. Shin, and H. Cha, “Smartphone-based pedestrian tracking in
indoor corridor environments,” Pers. Ubiquitous Comput., vol. 17, no. 2,
pp. 359–370, 2013.
[33] M. Hassan, “A performance model of pedestrian dead reckoning with
activity-based location updates,” in Proc. 18th IEEE Int. Conf. Netw.,
2012, pp. 64–69.
[34] M. Hardegger, D. Roggen, S. Mazilu, and G. Troster, “Actionslam: Using
location-related actions as landmarks in pedestrian slam,” in Proc. Int.
Conf. Indoor Positioning Indoor Navigat., 2012, pp. 1–10.
[35] M. Hardegger, G. Tröster, and D. Roggen, “Improved actionslam for long-
term indoor tracking with wearable motion sensors,” in Proc. 17th Annu.
Int. Symp. Int. Symp. Wearable Comput., 2013, pp. 1–8.
[36] M. Hardegger, S. Mazilu, D. Caraci, F. Hess, D. Roggen, and G. Tröster,
“Actionslam on a smartphone: At-home tracking with a fully wearable
system,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Indoor Positioning Indoor Navigat., 2013,
pp. 1–10.
[37] S. Grzonka, A. Karwath, F. Dijoux, and W. Burgard, “Activity-based
estimation of human trajectories,” IEEE Trans. Robot., vol. 28, no. 1,
pp. 234–245, Feb. 2012.
[38] R. Faragher, C. Sarno, and M. Newman, “Opportunistic radio slam for
indoor navigation using smartphone sensors,” in Proc. IEEE/ION Position
Location Navigat. Symp., 2012, pp. 120–128.
[39] P. Newson and J. Krumm, “Hidden markov map matching through noise
and sparseness,” in Proc. 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL Int. Conf. Advances
Geographic Inform. Syst., 2009, pp. 336–343.
[40] A. Thiagarajan, L. Ravindranath, K. LaCurts, S. Madden, H. Balakrishnan,
S. Toledo, and J. Eriksson, “Vtrack: Accurate, energy-aware road traffic
delay estimation using mobile phones,” in Proc. 7th ACM Conf. Embedded
Netw. Sens. Syst., 2009, pp. 85–98.
[41] H. Wang, Z. Wang, G. Shen, F. Li, S. Han, and F. Zhao, “Wheelloc:
Enabling continuous location service on mobile phone for outdoor sce-
narios,” in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2013, pp. 2733–2741.
[42] O. Woodman and R. Harle, “Pedestrian localisation for indoor environ-
ments,” in Proc. 10th Int. Conf. Ubiquitous Comput., 2008, pp. 114–123.
[43] A. Rai, K. K. Chintalapudi, V. N. Padmanabhan, and R. Sen, “Zee: Zero-
effort crowdsourcing for indoor localization,” in Proc. 18th Annu. Int.
Conf. Mobile Comput. Netw., 2012, pp. 293–304.
[44] A. Brajdic and R. Harle, “Walk detection and step counting on uncon-
strained smartphones,” in Proc. ACM Int. Joint Conf. Pervasive Ubiquitous
Comput., 2013, pp. 225–234.
[45] M. Alzantot and M. Youssef, “Crowdinside: Automatic construction of
indoor floorplans,” in Proc. 20th Int. Conf. Adva. Geographic Inform.
Syst., 2012, pp. 99–108.
[46] M. Mladenov and M. Mock, “A step counter service for java-enabled
devices using a built-in accelerometer,” in Proc. 1st Int. Workshop Context-
Aware Middleware Services, Affiliated 4th Int. Conf. Commun. Syst. Softw.
Middleware, 2009, pp. 1–5.
[47] L. R. Rabiner, “A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applica-
tions in speech recognition,” in Proc. IEEE, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 257–286,
Feb. 1989.
[48] Y. Kim, Y. Chon, and H. Cha, “Smartphone-based collaborative and au-
tonomous radio fingerprinting,” IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., C, Appl.
Rev., vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 112–122, Jan. 2012.
Baoding Zhou (S’14) received the B.E. degree from
School of Information Science and Engineering from
Shandong University, Jinan, China, in 2009, and is
currently working toward the Ph.D. degree with the
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in
Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan
University, Wuhan, China.
His research interests include indoor localization
and navigation, pervasive computing, and intelligent
transportation.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

ZHOU et al.: ACTIVITY SEQUENCE-BASED INDOOR PEDESTRIAN LOCALIZATION USING SMARTPHONES 13

Qingquan Li received the Ph.D. degree in geographic
information system and photogrammetry from the
Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Map-
ping, Wuhan, China, in 1998.
He is currently a Professor with Shenzhen Uni-
versity, Guangdong, China and Wuhan University,
Wuhan. His research areas include 3-D and dynamic
data modeling in GIS, location-based service, sur-
veying engineering, integration of GIS, global posi-
tioning system and remote sensing, intelligent trans-
portation system, and road surface checking.
Wei Tu (M’14) received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees
in computer science from Wuhan University, Wuhan,
China, in 2007 and 2013, respectively.
He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the
Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Spatial Smart Sens-
ing and Service, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen,
China. His research interests include spatiotempo-
ral data modeling, spatiotemporal data analysis, and
spatiotemporal data mining.

Qingzhou Mao (M’14) received the Ph.D. degree

in photogrammetry and remote sensing from Wuhan
University, Wuhan, China, in 2008. Xing Zhang received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in
He is an Associate Professor of Wuhan University,
geographic information science from Wuhan Univer-
Wuhan, China. His main research interests include
sity, Wuhan, China.
satellite navigation system, remote sensing and geo-
He is currently with the Shenzhen Key Laboratory
graphic information system (3S) integrates theory and
of Spatial Information Smart Sensing and Services,
method, GNSS/IMU navigation and position tech-
Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China. His research
nology, high-precision laser measurement and point
interests include mobile navigation, visual cognition,
cloud data intelligent processing algorithm, pattern ubiquitous computing, and intelligent transportation.
recognition, and vision measurement technology and
its application in mapping, road, railways and tunnels and other major projects
testing and measurement field.

View publication stats