Advances in thermal infrared localization: Challenges and solutions

Indoor localization is one of the necessary components to provide location based services in indoor environments. Over the last years, several indoor localization systems have been proposed; however, most of them require people to wear some kind of tag or emitter. In this paper, a passive indoor localization system is described, which is solely based on passive thermal infrared sensors. Consequently, the thermal radiation of humans can be exploited and no additional tag is required. First, this paper gives a short introduction to passive thermal infrared localization and its challenges. Second, state of the art solutions are presented. This includes a human-assisted semi-automatic calibration algorithm, a thermal infrared simulation environment and a multi-target localization algorithm.