EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES & APPLICATIONS
Convolutional Neural Networks Based Indoor Wi-Fi
Localization with a Novel Kind of CSI Images
Haihan Li2, Xiangsheng Zeng2, Yunzhou Li1,*, Shidong Zhou1, 2, Jing Wang1
1
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
2
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
* The corresponding author, email: liyunzhou@tsinghua.edu.cn
Abstract: Indoor Wi-Fi localization of mobile
devices plays a more and more important role
along with the rapid growth of location-based
services and Wi-Fi mobile devices. In this pa-
per, a new method of constructing the channel
state information (CSI) image is proposed to
improve the localization accuracy. Compared
with previous methods of constructing the CSI
image, the new kind of CSI image proposed
is able to contain more channel information
such as the angle of arrival (AoA), the time of
arrival (TOA) and the amplitude. We construct
three gray images by using phase differences
of different antennas and amplitudes of differ-
ent subcarriers of one antenna, and then merge
them to form one RGB image. The localization
method has off-line stage and on-line stage. In
the off-line stage, the composed three-channel
RGB images at training locations are used to
train a convolutional neural network (CNN)
which has been proved to be efficient in im-
age recognition. In the on-line stage, images
at test locations are fed to the well-trained
CNN model and the localization result is the
weighted mean value with highest output val-
ues. The performance of the proposed method
is verified with extensive experiments in the
representative indoor environment.
Keywords: convolutional neural network;
indoor Wi-Fi localization; channel state infor-
Received: Apr. 01, 2019
Editor: Jun Fang
mation; CSI image
250
I. INTRODUCTION
With the rapid development of Wi-Fi networks
and the explosive increase of location-based
services such as indoor navigation, indoor
tracking and activity recognition [1-3], the lo-
cation of the mobile device is more and more
important and indoor Wi-Fi localization be-
comes a research hot-spot [4-6].
Different kinds of localization methods
have been proposed. Some of the methods are
based on the AOA, some of the methods are
based on the TOA and others are based on the
signal propagation model [7-9]. Some of these
methods need more than one access point
(AP) and the performances of these methods
are highly relying on the measurement accu-
racy which is hard to achieve with commodity
Wi-Fi devices. The indoor fingerprint based
localization methods have a better perfor-
mance than the above methods and attract the
interest of researchers [10]. The main idea of
the fingerprint based localization method is
extracting feature information of the measured
locations which is the so called ‘fingerprint’
and in the real-time localization stage, the Wi-
Fi signals of the device needed to be localized
are compared with the known features to de-
cide the localization. As a result, the indoor
fingerprint based localization methods usually
have two stages, i.e., an off-line training stage
China Communications • September 2019
and an on-line localization stage. In the off-
line training stage, Wi-Fi signals of various
reference points (RPs) are measured and col-
lected to build a database. With the help of
the database, the features of the RPs can be
extracted and used to train a model. In the on-
line localization stage, the Wi-Fi signals of the
target device are measured and fed to the well-
trained model to output the location result.
Received signal strength (RSS) is a kind
of widely used fingerprints mainly because
RSS is easily measured at the Wi-Fi receivers
[11-13]. In RADAR which is the first to use
RSS as the fingerprint, the location process
is carried out with a deterministic method by
calculating the Euclidean distance between the
RSSs of the device needed to be localized and
the RSSs of the RPs [14]. There are three main
shortcomings of using RSS as the fingerprint
[15]. First, RSS is a kind of coarse channel in-
formation which means RSS cannot precisely
reflect the relationship between the wireless
channel and the propagation environment.
Second, RSS of a fixed location varies a lot
over time because RSS is the converged result
of each path in the propagation environment
and sensitive to the time varying multipath
fading. Third, it is hard for RSS to be suitable
among different kinds of mobile devices. For
example, laptops and cell phones have dif-
ferent antenna characteristics so the RSSs of
the laptops and cell phones are different in
the same location. The model trained with the
RSSs of laptops may not work well with the
RSSs of the cell phones [4, 6].
CSI is the wireless channel response of each
antenna and each subcarrier in a multiple-in-
put, multiple-output orthogonal frequency-di-
vision multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system.
CSI is the aggregation of the multipath infor-
mation, so CSI can show the multipath effect
better and more accurately than RSS [16-19].
Open-source device drivers for commodity
Wi-Fi network interface cards (NICs), such
as the Atheros AR9580 chipset, is available
nowadays, which makes it easy for us to ob-
tain CSI in the Wi-Fi devices [4]. For a given
location, AP and devices stay static in space.
China Communications • September 2019
Therefore, the propagation environment keeps
stable which means the multipath information In this paper, a new
also changes little [25-28]. In other words, if method of construct-
the locations of AP and device are established, ing the channel state
information (CSI)
the CSI between the AP and the device are
image is proposed to
guaranteed and unique, which should be a improve the localiza-
more accurate feature than RSS [20]. How to tion accuracy.
extract the static CSI and how to use the static
CSI as a-priori information in channel estima-
tion have been discussed in [20].
CSI data cannot directly reflect useful in-
formation of the channel, so some estimation
methods of channel parameters like the MU-
SIC algorithm are used to estimate wireless
channel parameters, e.g., the number of main
paths, AOAs and TOAs of main paths [21,
29, 30]. In order to omit the above calculation
process of the parameter estimation, some CSI
image construction methods are proposed to
deal with CSI data directly. ConFi proposed
in [6] builds a CSI image with multiple chan-
nels by only using the amplitude information
of CSI. For one RP, the CSI image contains
M sub-images, where M is the number of re-
ceiving antennas. For one sub-image, T CSI
measurements with N subcarriers at the same
RP are grouped to construct an N × T image
matrix. Therefore, if the number of receiving
antennas is 3 which is the typical antenna
number of Atheros AR9580 chipset, the CSI
image has 3 channels which is similar to the
RGB image. CiFi proposed in [4, 5] puts for-
ward another kind of CSI image by only using
the phase information of CSI. CiFi constructs
a 60 ×1 CSI vector by combining 30 phase
differences between the first antenna and the
second antenna with 30 phase differences
between the second antenna and the third
antenna. Then, 60 packet samples are used to
construct a 60 × 60 CSI image. It should be
noted that the CSI image in CiFi only has one
channel.
Different from the CiFi and the ConFi, a
novel kind of CSI image construction method
is proposed in this paper. Like the RGB imag-
es, the CSI image we proposed has 3 sub-im-
ages. The first sub-image is the amplitudes of
subcarriers of the first antenna of T CSI mea-
251
 surements at the same RP. The second sub-im-
age is the N phase differences between the
first antenna and the second antenna. The third
sub-image is the N phase differences between
the second antenna and the third antenna. Due
to the CSI output of Atheros AR9580 chipset,
N =114 and T = 114 make the CSI image be a
114 ×114 × 3 RGB image. Therefore, the CSI
image can contain more channel information
such as the AOA, TOA and amplitude.
CSI images are fed to train CNN models to
extract the features of given locations mainly
because the CNN model has been proved to be
effective in image recognition [22]. Both CiFi
and ConFi claim to be the first to employ the
CNN for indoor localization while we have al-
ready employed the CNN for channel feature
extraction in [20]. A light-weight CNN model
named ShuffleNet V2 is adopted in our local-
ization for the reason that the ShuffleNet V2 is
efficient and can be easily applied with mobile
devices [23].
The main contributions of this paper are
summarized as follows.
• We propose a novel construction method of
CSI images. This new kind of CSI images
has 3 sub-images like RGB images, which
means the CSI image constructed via the
new proposed method can contain more
channel information such as the AOA, TOA
and amplitude.
• The CSI images are used as the input data
to train the light-weight CNN model. The
outputs of the well-trained CNN model are
used as the weighted average coefficients to
estimate the position of the devices.
• Repeated measurements with commodity
2.4 GHz Wi-Fi are carried out in the typical
indoor environment to verify the perfor-
mance of the proposed localization method.
The results show that the proposed local-
ization method achieves better location ac-
curacy than two existing schemes. Besides,
the impact of various system parameters is
evaluated.
The paper is organized as follows. Section
II presents the CSI image construction method
we proposed. The CNN stricture we adopted
252
is discussed in Section III. The localization
method is given in Section IV. Section V pres-
ents the results of repeated measurements and
the performance of the method. Section VI
concludes this paper.
II. CSI IMAGE CONSTRUCTION
2.1 CSI feature
The CSI matrix of a MIMO-OFDM system
with 114 sub-carriers and 3 receiving antennas
is shown in equation (1) and equation (2).
H … H 
 1,1 1,114 
 
= H H … H .(1)
2,1 2,114 
 
 H 3,1 … H 3,114 
N
H p,q = ∑ α n e
jφn − j 2π（pd sin θ n / λq +f qτ n）
.(2)
n =1
H p,q is the CSI of the p th antenna and the
q th subcarrier. N is the number of Multipath
Components (MPCs) which is directly relat-
ed to the main scatterers in the propagation
environment. Since the main scatterers in the
indoor propagation environment are mainly
walls and other immovable scatterers, N is
relatively spare and stable when the locations
of AP and devices are established [25,26]. α n
is the complex amplitude of the nth path which
represents the propagation attenuation.φn is the
frequency-independent random phase noise
of the nth path. λq and f q are the wavelength
and the frequency of the q th subcarrier. d is the
pairwise separation between antennas (typical-
ly half the wavelength λ). θ n and τ n are DOA
and TOA of the nth path.
N, θ n and τ n are mainly determined by
the main scatterers in the indoor propagation
environment. Wireless channel refers to the
free space from the transmitter to the receiver
which can be determined by the reflection off
every object in the radio environment. The
radio propagation environment is main deter-
mined by the real spatial information in the
same way. So the CSI is mainly determined
by the location of the target device and can be
China Communications • September 2019
the unique feature of the location. According
to equation (2), CSI is the sum of each path
the transmitted signal has traveled. Therefore,
both the amplitudes and phases can contain the
CSI feature. Roughly stated, the amplitudes
can represent more information of the distance
and the number of MPCs while the phases can
represent more information of the DOA and
the TOA.
2.2 Phase difference information
In fact, the phases of the CSI provided from
the Atheros AR9580 chipset contain some off-
sets. Denoting ∠H p,q as the phase of the CSI
got from the Atheros AR9580 chipset. ∠H p ,q
can be written as
∠H p ,q = ∠H true + (θ p + θ s )mq + θ c + θ pll.(3)
p ,q
matrix on 114 subcarriers from each of the
three antennas. 114 packet samples for every
training location are used to form a CSI image.
The amplitudes of the CSI on each subcarrier
of the first antenna of the 114 packet samples
are formed to be a 114 ×114 matrix which is
the first sub-image. The phase differences of
CSI of the 114 packet samples on each subcar-
rier between the first antenna and the second
antenna construct a 114 ×114 matrix which
is used as the second sub-image. The phase
differences of CSI of the 114 packet samples
on each subcarrier between the second anten-
na and the third antenna construct a 114 ×114
matrix which is used as the third sub-image.
Every sub-image is in fact a real number
114 ×114 matrix whose values are normalized
to a range of 0-255. Therefore, each sub-image

∠H true is the theoretical phase of the CSI

p ,q is an 8-bit gray image and the three sub-im-
of the p th antenna and the q th subcarrier. θ p, ages construct an RGB image as shown in
θ s and θ c are the phase errors due to packet figrue 1. Subfigure (a), (b), (c) in figrue 1 are
boundary detection (PBD), sampling frequen- the three 8-bit gray sub-images and subfigure
cy offset (SFO) and central frequency offset (d) is the composed RGB CSI image of three
(CFO) [4, 5]. mq is the index of subcarrier channels.
q. θ pll is the initial phase offset of the phase-
locked loop (PLL). For the antennas on the
same NIC, they have the same down-converter
frequency and system clock. As a result, the
real measured phase on subcarrier i from dif-
ferent antennas have the same frequency dif-
ference, packet detection delay and sampling
period which means they have the same PBD,
SFO and CFO. The measured phase difference
on subcarrier q between different antennas is
given by
∆∠H q = ∆∠H qtrue + ∆θ pll.(4) (a) (b)
true
∆∠H q is the theoretical phase difference
on subcarrier q between two different anten-
nas. ∆θ pll is the constant phase difference.
Therefore, the phase difference is more stable
than the phase. As a result, phase differences
instead of phases of the CSI are used to con-
struct the CSI image.

2.3 CSI image construction (c) (d)

The Atheros AR9580 chipset provides a CSI

Fig. 1. CSI sub-images and CSI image.

China Communications • September 2019 253

 III. CNN STRUCTURE
3.1 CNN structure
The CNN is a widely used deep learning tech-
nique duo to the excellent performance for the
image recognition. The CNN is characterized
by consisting of one or more convolution
layers and pooling layers. The CNN has three
unique concepts: local filters, max-pooling,
and weight sharing. There are three main kinds
of layers in CNN which are convolution lay-
ers, pooling layers and fully connected layers
[22].
In the convolution layer, a set of filters is
applied to process small local parts of the in-
put data. These filters are replicated along the
whole input space.
= xil Re LU ( wijl ⊗ x lj−1 + bil ).(5)
Re LU ( x) = max(0, x).(6)
xil is the i th feature map of the l th layer. x lj−1 is
the j th feature map of the (l − 1)th layer connect-
ed to xil. wijl and bil are the convolutional kernel
of the filter and the bias of the i th feature map
of the l th layer. Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs)
are chosen as the activation function.
In the pooling layer, a lower-resolution
version of the convolution layer activation is
generated by taking the maximum filter activa-
tion from different positions within a specified
window.
The fully connected layer combines inputs
from all positions to classify the overall in-
puts. In this localization method, the output
is the probability of the target device at the
corresponding RP. Therefore, it is a multi-clas-
sification problem. The softmax is chosen as
the activation function of output layer. The
softmax can be defined as
wTj x ( i )
(i ) e and the other consists of separable depth-wise
pj = K
.(7)
wTj x ( i )
∑e
j
p j is the j output of the fully connected
th
layer which is in the range of [0, 1], x (i ) is the
output vector of the second last layer where i
is the index of training CSI images, w j is the
254
weight vector of the j th output of the fully con-
nected layer. K is the size of the output layer
which equals the number of RPs.
The cross-entropy loss function with the L2
regularization is chosen as the loss function.
The regularization term helps to avoid over
fitting. The cross-entropy loss function J ( w )
can be written as [24]
1 M K 
J (w) =−  ∑∑1{z (i ) = j}log p (ji ) 
M =i 1 =j 1 
λ K 2
+ ∑ w j .(8)
2 M j =1
M and K are the sizes of the input training
CSI image set and the size of output layer. 1{.}
is the indicator function. z (i ) is the index of the
RP of the i th CSI image.λ > 0 is known as the
regularization parameter. The goal of the train-
ing of the CNN is to minimize the cross-entro-
py loss function J ( w ). The partial derivative
is:
∂J ( w ) 1 M K
− ∑∑ x (i ) (1{z (i ) =
= j} − p (ji ) )
∂w j M =i 1 =j 1
.(9)
λ
+ wj
M
The classic back propagation (BP) algo-
rithm of the CNN is used to pass the cross-en-
tropy loss function from the output layer to
the input layer to update the parameters along
with the derivatives [22].
3.2 ShuffleNet V2 structure
ShuffleNet V2 is a light-weight CNN model
proposed by [23]. Based on the intuition of its
previous version ShuffleNet V1, it adopts a
simple operator named channel split that split
the input c channels of feature map into two
branches, one with c’ channels and the other
with c-c’. By following the thought of bottle-
neck structure, one branch remains as identity
convolution operation. There are two simi-
lar designs of this proposed structure, one is
called basic unit and the other is called down
sampling unit. Specifically, the basic unit is
made up of a 1×1 point-wise convolution and
a 3×3 depth-wise convolution, followed by
another 1×1 point-wise convolution in one of
China Communications • September 2019
the two branches. The down sampling unit has IV. THE LOCALIZATION METHOD
a two-stride 3×3 depth-wise convolution sep-
arately on both the two branches. As for the As introduced above, the localization method
branches combinations, both units concatenat- consists of off-line stage and on-line stage.
ing the output feature map of the two branches In the off-line stage, CSI data are collected
on channel dimension, after which a channel and CSI images are constructed at each RP.
shuffling operation follows. ShuffleNet V2 The constructed CSI images are fed to train
is built upon the basic block that consists the ShuffleNet V2.
of multiple combinations of these two basic In the on-line stage, the CSI of the target
units. This structure is efficient in float-point device is measured and sent to the well-trained
operations (FLOPs) and memory access cost CNN. The outputs are K probabilities which
(MAC), which are the mainly consideration can be interpreted as the probability that the
when designing network on mobile devices. target device is located at each RP. Therefore,
Besides, it also reaches state-of-the-art perfor- the outputs of the CNN in fact are the result of
mances on classification and object detection a multi-classification problem while the real
tasks.
The 114 ×114 × 3 CSI images are fed to the
Table I. Overall architecture of ShuffeNet v2.
ShuffleNet V2. The layers are a convolution
Layer Output Size Kernel Size Stride Repeat Output channels
layer, a max pooling layer, Stage 1, Stage 2,
Image 114x114 3
Stage 3, a convolution layer, a global pooling
Conv 57x57 3x3 2 1 24
layer and a fully connected layer in order.
MaxPool 28x28 3x3 2 1 24
Stage 1 and Stage 3 contain a down sampling
Stage 1 14x14 2/1 1/3 116
unit and 3 basic units. Stage 2 contains a down
Stage 2 7x7 2/1 1/7 232
sampling unit and 7 basic units. K is the num-
Stage 3 4x4 2/1 1/3 464
ber of RPs. The sizes of output channels are
Conv 4x4 1x1 1 1 1024
predefined by the ShuffeNet v2. Overall archi-
GlobalPool 1x1 4x4 1 1024
tecture of ShuffeNet v2 is introduced in Table
Full connected 1x1 K
I and figrue 2.

Phase difference Amplitude for 114

2&1 packets 3x3@24 3x3 Pooling
Conv Stride=2
Stride=2

Stage1
Downsample Unit x1
Basic Unit x3
57x57x24 feature 28x28x24 feature
114x114x3 Image map map
Phase difference
3&2

Stage3 Stage2
Downsample Unit x1 Downsample Unit x1
Basic Unit x3 Basic Unit x7
1x1@1024
Conv
14x14x116
feature map
4x4x464 7x7x232
feature map feature map

4X4 GlobalPooling
Stride=1

1024 x K
4x4x1024 feature Fully connected
map layer

K output

Fig. 2. Structure of the ShuffleNet V2.

China Communications • September 2019 255

 location of the target device can be anywhere. are scattered as showed in figrue 3. In the ex-
The weighted R largest outputs are used to cal- periments of the CiFi, distance between two
culate the real coordinate of the target device. adjacent training or two testing locations is
R
pL set to the same 1.8 m and the R is set to be 2.
L = ∑ R i i .(10)
Therefore, the location of the target device is
i
∑ pj j easily calculated as the midpoint of the 2 RPs
L is the calculated coordinate of the target while the real location of the target device can
device. Li is the real coordinate of the i th RP be anywhere. In the experiments of the ConFi,
of the R largest RPs. pi is the i th output of the the data from the RPs are used as the training
CNN related to the i th RP. sets, validation sets and test sets. The perfor-
mance of the ConFi in the locations which are
not the RPs are not verified. In our experiment
V. MEASUREMENT AND VALIDATION
setup, RPs are distributed randomly in the of-
fice. 11 RPs are chosen as the training sets and
5.1 Measurement configuration 3 RPs are chosen as the test sets as shown in
To verify the performance of the proposed figrue 3. Training locations are marked as red
localization method, channel measurement dots and testing locations are marked as yel-
campaigns were carried out in an office room low dots.
in Tsinghua University. CSI data are measured 5.2 Measurement validation
and stored from repeated measurements.
Table 2 presents the system configuration To evaluate the performance, proposed local-
of measurements. ization method, CiFi and ConFi have been
Tx is set at the fixed location and 14 RPs compared. The main difference among the
three methods is the construction of the CSI
image, so the same CNN formerly introduced
Table II. System configuration of measurements.
as the ShuffleNet V2 is used to deal with the
Channel parameter Value
three different kinds of CSI images. In order
Number of antenna at Tx 3
to adapt the CSI data of the Atheros AR9580
Number of antenna at Rx 3
chipset, the CiFi image is a 228 × 228 matrix
Bandwidth 40 MHz
whose values are normalized to a range of
Number of subcarriers 114
0-255. The construction of the ConFi image
Center frequency 2.437 GHz
keeps the same method introduced previously
LOS/NLOS LOS
in Section I.
Antenna height at Tx 2m
Table III presents the mean and standard de-
Antenna height at Rx 1m
viation (STD) of localization errors of the pro-
posed method, CiFi and ConFi. The proposed
method achieves a mean error of 1.5762 m and
2.56m an STD error of 0.6812 m which outperforms
2.21m
Rx2 Rx6 Rx11 the other two methods. This result proves that
Rx9
our proposed CSI image construction method
contains more channel information than CiFi
3.86m

Rx4 Tx
Rx1
Rx14 Rx13 Rx12 and ConFi while the CNN works effectively in
Rx5
the extraction of the CSI features.
1.45m

Rx7
Figure 4 presents the cumulative distribu-
Rx3 Rx8
8.68m tion function (CDF) of distance errors of the
three methods.
The proposed method has 79% of the test
Fig. 3. Layout of the mobile measurement environment. locations having an error less than 2 m, while

256 China Communications • September 2019

that for CiFi is 38% and that for ConFi is RPs differ much larger.
26%. About 98% of the test locations for the
5.3 Impact of system parameters
proposed method have an error under 3 m
while the percentage of test locations having To study the impact of the channel size of CSI
a smaller error than 3 m is 59% and 52% for images, the localization errors of CSI images
CiFi and ConFi. Therefore, the localization
method proposed achieves best performance Table III. Localization errors of the three localization methods.
among the three methods in this experiment. Method Mean error(m) Std.dev.(m)
This is mainly because the novel CSI image Proposed Method 1.5762 0.6812
construction method contains more informa- CiFi 2.3699 1.2915
tion which makes the features among different ConFi 3.1804 1.4586

1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

0.6 0.6
CDF

CDF

0.5 0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3
Proposed Method
0.2 CiFi 0.2
ConFi Proposed Method with 3 Channels
0.1 Proposed Method with 2 Channels
0.1

0 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Distance Error/m Distance Error/m

Fig. 4. Comparison of the performance among proposed method, Fig. 5. Comparison of the performance between proposed method
CiFi and ConFi. with 3 channels and 2 channels.

1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

0.6 0.6
CDF

CDF

0.5 0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3
Learning Rate = 0.005
0.2 CNN with 3 STAGES 0.2 Learning Rate = 0.01
Learning Rate = 0.02
CNN with 2 STAGES
0.1 0.1

0 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Distance Error/m Distance Error/m

Fig. 6. Comparison of the performance between CNN with 3 stages Fig. 7. Comparison of the performance among learning rate =0.005,
and 2 stages. 0.01, 0.02.

China Communications • September 2019 257

Table IV. Localization errors of CSI images with 3 channels and 2 channels. with complete 3 channels and CSI images
Channel Mean error(m) Std.dev.(m) without the first sub-image which is the am-
3 1.5762 0.6812 plitudes of the CSI on each subcarrier of the
2 3.2410 1.7108 first antenna of the 114 packet samples are
compared in Table IV and figrue 5. The mean
error and STD error of the CSI images with
Table V. Localization errors of different stages.
2 channels are 3.2410 m and 1.7108 m. The
CNN Mean error(m) Std.dev.(m)
percentages of test locations for CSI images
3 Stages 1.5762 0.6812
with 3 channels having a smaller error than 1
2 Stages 2.0097 1.1133
m, 2 m, 3 m are 24%, 79%, 98% while those
for CSI images with 2 channels are 13%, 32%,
Table VI. Localization errors of different learning rates. 43%. It is shown that CSI images with 3 chan-
Learning rate Mean error(m) Std.dev.(m) nels contains more features than CSI images
0.005 2.8949 1.7261 with 2 channels.
0.01 1.5762 0.6812 To study the impact of the depth of the
0.02 2.3088 1.2423 CNN, the localization errors of the CNN with
complete 3 stages and the CNN with 2 stages
which does not have the third stage are com-
Table VII. Localization errors among different R. pared in Table V and figrue 6. The mean error
R Mean error(m) Std.dev.(m) and STD error of the CNN only having 2 stag-
1 2.2627 1.0126 es are 2.0097 m and 1.1133 m. The percentag-
2 1.7937 0.7438 es of test locations for the CNN with complete
3 1.5762 0.6812 3 stages having a smaller error than 1 m, 2 m,
4 1.6649 0.5329 3 m are 24%, 79%, and 98% while those for
5 1.7145 0.5130 the CNN with 2 stages are 16%, 70%, 71%.
6 1.7004 0.4834 The result represents that the deeper the CNN
is, the better the localization method proposed
performs within a certain range.
To study the impact of the learning rate of
the CNN, the localization errors of the CNN
1 with a learning rate = 0.005, 0.01, 0.02 are
R=1 compared in Table VI and figrue 7. The mean
0.9 R=2
R=3 error of the CNN with the three different
0.8 R=4 learning rates are 2.8949 m, 1.5762 m and
R=5
0.7 R=6 2.3088 m. The result can be explained by a
0.6 low learning rate may not allow the CNN to
converge while a higher learning rate may not
CDF

0.5
reach the best convergence point. Thus, the
0.4
learning rate needs be chosen carefully in dif-
0.3 ferent experiments.
0.2 To study the impact of the R which is the
0.1
number of the largest outputs to calculate the
location of the target device, the localization
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 errors of the R= 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 are compared
Distance Error/m in Table VII and figrue 8. The mean error of
the of the R= 1,2,3,4,5,6 are 2.2627 m, 1.7937
m, 1.5762 m, 1.6649 m, 1.7145 m and 1.7004
Fig. 8. Comparison of the performance among R =1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

258 China Communications • September 2019

m. When the value of R is 3, the errors are
the smallest. More RPs cannot reduce the
localization error mainly because more RPs
introduce more estimation errors. Besides, R
=3 conforms to the principle of the triangular
positioning.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a novel CSI image construction
method is introduced which contains more CSI
features than CiFi and ConFi. A light-weight
CNN model is used to process the CSI images.
With measurement data in an office room, it is
proved that the CSI image construction meth-
od we proposed outperforms CiFi and ConFi
in indoor Wi-Fi localization.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (No.61631013),
National Key Basic Research Program of Chi-
na (973 Program) (No. 2013CB329002), Na-
tional Major Project (NO. 2018ZX03001006-
003).
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Biographies
Haihan Li, received the BS and
MS degree from Tsinghua Uni-
versity, Beijing China in 2011
and 2014 respectively. He is
currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree. His research now
focuses on channel modeling
and radio channel measure-
ments, as well as the data min-
ing of statistical wireless chan-
nel state information. email:lihh14@mails.tsinghua.
edu.cn.
Xiangsheng Zeng, received
the BS degree from Tsinghua
University, Beijing China in
2017. He is currently pursuing
MS degree from information
and communication engineer-
ing. His research interest is now
on indoor positioning and
channel modeling.
Yunzhou Li, the corresponding
author, email:liyunzhou@tsing-
hua.edu.cn, He received his
Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua
Univer sity in 2004. Nowa-
days,he is an associate profes-
sor of Tsinghua University. Dr.
Li mainly focus on signal pro-
cessing technologies in wire-
less and mobile communica-
tions, including spatial-time signal processing, chan-
nel estimation, multi-user detection, and synchroni-
zation algorithms for CDMA/OFDM system. Also he
is interesting in analysis, optimization design and en-
hancement of cellular system and WLAN.
Shidong Zhou, received the
B.S. and M.S. degrees in wire-
less communications from
Southeast University, Nanjing,
China, in 1991 and 1994, re-
spectively, and the Ph.D. degree
in communication and infor-
mation systems from Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China, in
1998. From 1999 to 2001, he
was in charge of several projects in the China 3G
Mobile Communication R&D Project. He is currently
a Professor at Tsinghua University. He is currently a
member of the China FuTURE Project. His research
interests are in the area of wireless and mobile com-
munications.
Jing Wang, received the BS
and MS degree in electronic
engineering from Tsinghua
University, Beijing China in
1983 and 1986 respectively. He
has been on the Faculty at the
Tsinghua University since 1986.
He currently is a professor of
the School of Information Sci-
e n c e a n d Te c h n o l o g y. H e
serves as the vice director of Tsinghua National Lab
for Information Science and Technology. His research
interests are in the area of wireless communications,
including transmission and networking technologies
of 4G/B4G. He has published more than 150 confer-
ence and journal papers.
China Communications • September 2019