iBeacon Indoor Positioning Method Combined with Real-Time Anomaly Rate to Determine Weight Matrix

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Dec 27;21(1):120. doi: 10.3390/s21010120.

Abstract

This paper proposes an indoor positioning method based on iBeacon technology that combines anomaly detection and a weighted Levenberg-Marquadt (LM) algorithm. The proposed solution uses the isolation forest algorithm for anomaly detection on the collected Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) data from different iBeacon base stations, and calculates the anomaly rate of each signal source while eliminating abnormal signals. Then, a weight matrix is set by using each anomaly ratio and the RSSI value after eliminating the abnormal signal. Finally, the constructed weight matrix and the weighted LM algorithm are combined to solve the positioning coordinates. An Android smartphone was used to verify the positioning method proposed in this paper in an indoor scene. This experimental scenario revealed an average positioning error of 1.540 m and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.748 m. A large majority (85.71%) of the positioning point errors were less than 3 m. Furthermore, the RMSE of the method proposed in this paper was, respectively, 38.69%, 36.60%, and 29.52% lower than the RMSE of three other methods used for comparison. The experimental results show that the iBeacon-based indoor positioning method proposed in this paper can improve the precision of indoor positioning and has strong practicability.

Keywords: Levenberg-Marquadt; anomaly detection; iBeacon-based positioning; indoor positioning; isolation forest.