A novel acoustic indoor localization system employing CDMA

Abstract

Nowadays outdoor location systems have been used extensively in all fields of human life from military applications to daily life. However, these systems cannot operate in indoor applications. Hence, this paper considers a novel indoor location system that aims to locate an object within an accuracy of about 2 cm using ordinary and inexpensive off-the-shelf devices and that was designed and tested in an office room to evaluate its performance. In order to compute the distance between the transducers (speakers) and object to be localized (microphone), time-of-arrival measurements of acoustic signals consisting of Binary Phase Shift Keying modulated Gold sequences are performed. This DS-CDMA scheme assures accurate distance measurements and provides immunity to noise and interference. Two methods have been proposed for location estimation. The first method takes the average of four location estimates obtained by trilateration technique. In the second method, only a single robust position estimate is obtained using three distances while the least reliable fourth distance measurement is not taken into account. The system's performance is evaluated at positions from two height levels using system parameters determined by preliminary experiments. The precision distributions in the work area and the precision versus accuracy plots depict the system performance. The proposed system provides location estimates of better than 2 cm accuracy with 99% precision.