A novel clustering-based approach of indoor location fingerprinting

This study proposes a clustering-based Wi-Fi fingerprinting localization algorithm. The proposed algorithm first presents a novel support vector machine based clustering approach, namely SVM-C, which uses the margin between two canonical hyperplanes for classification instead of using the Euclidean distance between two centroids of reference locations. After creating the clusters of fingerprints by SVM-C, our positioning system embeds the classification mechanism into a positioning task and compensates for the large database searching problem. The proposed algorithm assigns the matched cluster surrounding the test sample and locates the user based on the corresponding cluster´s fingerprints to reduce the computational complexity and remove estimation outliers. Experimental results from realistic Wi-Fi test-beds demonstrated that our approach apparently improves the positioning accuracy. As compared to three existing clustering-based methods, K-means, affinity propagation, and support vector clustering, the proposed algorithm reduces the mean localization errors by 25.34%, 25.21%, and 26.91%, respectively.