Accurate positioning of mobile phones in a crowd using laser range scanners

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to positioning mobile phone users in a crowd of people. We assume such a situation that people in specific space (e.g., an exhibition hall) have mobile phones and they periodically probe proximity between the surrounding users via short-range wireless communication (e.g., Bluetooth). We also assume that laser range scanners (LRSs) are deployed in the space to track positions of those mobile phone users. By fusing the accurate, but anonymous trace information obtained by LRSs and the identified phone-to-phone proximity information, our method derives accurate identified traces of each mobile phone user, which are essential for pedestrian navigation and other emerging location/situation-aware applications. Through extensive simulations, we show that the tracking error quickly converges below 1m in most cases.