Performance evaluation of an acoustic indoor localization system based on a fingerprinting technique

We present an acoustic location system that adopts the time of arrival of the path of maximum amplitude as a signature and estimates the target position through nonparametric kernel regression. The system was evaluated in experiments for two main configurations: a privacy-oriented configuration with code division multiple access operation and a centralized configuration with time division multiple access operation. The effects of the number and positions of sources on the performance of the privacy-oriented system was studied. Moreover, the effect of the number of fingerprint positions on the performance of both systems was investigated. Results showed that our privacy-oriented scheme provides an accuracy of 8.5 cm with 87% precision, whereas our centralized system provides an accuracy of 2.7 cm for 93% of measurements. A comparison between our privacy-oriented system and another acoustic location system based on code division multiple access operation and lateration was conducted on our test bench and revealed that the cumulative error distribution function of the fingerprint-based system is better than that of the lateration-based system. This result is similar to that found for Wi-Fi radio-based localization. However, our experiments are the first to demonstrate the detrimental effect that reverberation has on naive acoustic localization approaches.