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.