Urban building-level positioning using data-driven algorithms enhanced by spatial variations in sensor features
As individuals spend most of their time indoors, determining whether a mobile device is located indoors or outdoors – and identifying the specific building it is in – is essential for enabling building-level location-based services and fine-grained human activity analysis. However, existing indoor p...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis Group
2025-08-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Digital Earth |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/17538947.2025.2512410 |
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| Summary: | As individuals spend most of their time indoors, determining whether a mobile device is located indoors or outdoors – and identifying the specific building it is in – is essential for enabling building-level location-based services and fine-grained human activity analysis. However, existing indoor positioning techniques often rely on dedicated infrastructure or dense signal fingerprinting, limiting their scalability across diverse urban environments. To address this, we propose a lightweight, data-driven framework for building-level mobile device location recognition that integrates indoor/outdoor (I/O) classification and building matching using limited sensor data. A random forest model is trained on a structured, scene-diverse sample library to classify I/O status based on multi-sensor features. For devices identified as indoors, building identification is performed using a Bayesian inference model that incorporates prior knowledge derived from anonymous crowdsourced data, leveraging spatial heterogeneity in sensor feature distributions across candidate buildings. Experiments conducted in three Chinese cities demonstrated that I/O classification achieved over 90% accuracy, and building matching based on crowdsourced data achieved at least 70% precision using only satellite or Wi-Fi features. Our approach requires no infrastructure deployment or extensive labeled data, offering a scalable and practical solution for building-level location inference across large and heterogeneous regions. |
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| ISSN: | 1753-8947 1753-8955 |