Large-Scale Indoor Positioning using Geomagnetic
Field with Deep Neural Networks
Han Jun Bae and Lynn Choi
School of Electrical Engineering
Korea University
Seoul, Korea
{qwerty2901, lchoi}@korea.ac.kr
Abstract— The existing RF signal based indoor localization
techniques such as BLE or Wi-Fi fingerprinting are hard to apply
to large scale indoor environment such as airport and department
stores since the localization error grows as the physical dimension
of the indoor space increases. This can be attributed to unstable
received signal strengths (RSS) of the underlying RF signal, which
is enlarged with the increased physical scale and the complexity of
the indoor space. In this paper, instead of RF signal we use the
geomagnetic sensor signal for indoor localization, whose signal
strength is more stable than RF RSS. Our approach using the
geomagnetic field is as follows. Although similar geomagnetic field
values exist in indoor space, an object movement would experience
a unique sequence of the geomagnetic field signals as the
movement continues. We can locate the position of the object by
tracking the geomagnetic field signal sequence sensed with the
object movement by using a deep neural network model called
recurrent neural network (RNN), which is good at recognizing
time varying sequence of sensor data. We use two different
versions of RNN model: basic RNN and Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM). We have trained RNNs to learn the magnetic
field maps of both medium scale (about 94m x 26m) and large scale
(about 608m x 50m area) indoor testbeds and analyze both
training and test set results by tuning several training
hyperparameters. For comparison, we have also implemented
both Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi based fingerprinting
localization techniques and measured their localization accuracies
for the testbeds. By using Google TensorFlow 1.6 and Nvdia CUDA
Toolkit v9.0 with cuDNN v7.1 library as a deep learning
framework, we could achieve the average localization accuracy of
0.51 and 1.04 meters for the medium and the large-scale testbeds
respectively with LSTM model, substantially improving the
localization performance compared to the existing RF based
fingerprinting techniques.
Keywords—indoor localization; geomagnetic field; recurrent
neural network; machine learning, long short-term memory model;
I. INTRODUCTION
In the past few decades, a diverse range of indoor
localization schemes have been proposed. These schemes can be
classified by the type of sensor signals used, which includes LF,
RF, acoustic, IR, light, laser and etc. Among these the indoor
positioning system (IPS) based on RF signals such as Bluetooth
or Wi-Fi is the most common since such RF technology is
widely adopted by smart devices and signals are often available
in indoor environment. The RF based IPSs may measure the
received signal strength (RSS) [1, 2, 3], time of arrival (ToA) [4]
or time difference of arrival (TDoA) [5, 6] for the positioning.
However, ToA and TDoA are not common due to their large
clock synchronization overhead compared to the fast speed of
RF signal propagation. Therefore, most of RF based IPSs rely
on sensing RSS.
However, it is not easy to build high accuracy IPS even with
RF’s RSS. It is because of the time varying and unstable nature
of RF signal, which is caused by multi-path propagation,
diffraction, and scattering of RF signals incurred by the indoor
structures such as walls, furniture, humans and elevators. Over
10 to 20 meters of positioning errors are often reported in large-
scale indoor environment such as airports and department stores
[7]. Although LIDAR, UWB or ultrasonic signals can be used to
978-1-5386-8088-9/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
build IPSs with higher positioning accuracy, the infrastructure
system to generate and receive such signals is too expensive to
be used with smartphones or IoT devices. Furthermore, they
often require higher power consumption [8, 9, 10] or range
limitation [8]. Therefore, we need a fundamentally different
approach to build high accuracy yet cost effective IPS.
An alternative signal that can be used for IPS is the
geomagnetic field signal generated by the earth movement. The
geomagnetic field signal has several distinct advantages over
other signals. First, IPS based on the geomagnetic field does not
require infrastructure such as access points or beacons since the
geomagnetic field is created by nature unlike RF, ultrasonic, or
laser signals. Second, most of smart IoT devices and
smartphones already include IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit)
sensors, a.k.a. motion sensors, which include the magnetic field
sensor in addition to the accelerometers and gyroscope sensors.
Thus, it is easy to sense the geomagnetic field signal with these
smart devices. These two characteristics enable inexpensive IPS
implementation based on the geomagnetic field. Third, the
signal strength of the geomagnetic field is much more stable
over time than those of RF or ultrasonic signals, which would
potentially enable higher accuracy IPS [11].
Despite these advantages, it is not easy to achieve high
positioning accuracy even with the geomagnetic field signal in
the existing IPSs. Most of the existing geomagnetic field based
IPSs rely on fingerprinting with K-NN (K-Nearest Neighbor)
mapping, which is borrowed from RF fingerprinting.
Fingerprinting based IPS has the problem of sensing the same
received signal strength in multiple indoor locations. Although
RF-based fingerprinting is also vulnerable to the distribution of
the same received signal strength in multiple indoor locations, it
can alleviate the problem with multiple SSIDs since an RF signal
can reach a certain range depending on its transmission power.
As opposed to the RF-based fingerprinting [2, 3], techniques
using the geomagnetic field vector could not resolve the problem
of differentiating the same geomagnetic field value registered at
multiple locations, which could potentially degrade the
performance of the geomagnetic field based indoor localization
system.
In this work we propose a fundamentally different approach
to build the geomagnetic field based IPS. We first construct a
geomagnetic field map of an indoor space by collecting the
geomagnetic field vectors at reference points as done by the
existing geomagnetic field based IPSs. However, instead of K-
NN mapping we employ machine learning techniques based on
artificial neural networks. We train a neural network model to
memorize all feasible movement paths and their corresponding
geomagnetic field vector sequences of a moving object in the
space. Then, we can locate the position of a moving object by
using the sequence of consecutive geomagnetic field vectors
collected during the movement as an input to the neural network.
Although a single geomagnetic field vector can lead to multiple
locations of the same value, a sequence of the geomagnetic field
vectors can uniquely identify the current position of the object
as the sequence grows longer.
In order to memorize the contiguously changing patterns of
geomagnetic vector sequences, we use a recurrent neural
network (RNN) model which is good for recognizing the time-
varying sequence of data. The reason why RNN is good for
recognizing the time-sequence data can be seen from its
architecture. RNN cannot only process the current input data but
it can also remember the past sequence of input data and use
them to yield a different result from its recurrent network model.
In our earlier work [11] we have shown the preliminary results
of our geomagnetic field based IPS implementation for a small-
scale testbed by using a simple basic RNN model.
However, the basic RNN has the vanishing gradient problem.
In [12], the vanishing gradient problem was analyzed in detail.
Whenever the gradient of the error function of the neural
network is propagated back through a node of a neural network,
it gets scaled by a certain factor. For nearly all practically
relevant cases, this factor is either greater than one or smaller
than one. As a result, in the basic RNN model the gradient blows
up or decays exponentially over time. Thus, the gradient either
dominates the next weight adaptation step or effectively gets lost.
To avoid this scaling effect, we employ a more advanced version
of RNN model called long short-term memory (LSTM) model
[13], addressing the vanishing gradient problem of basic RNN.
To evaluate our geomagnetic-field IPS based on our RNN
models for large-scale indoor environment, we use two testbeds:
a medium-scale campus testbed called Hana Square at Korea
University and a large-scale off-campus testbed at the Incheon
International Airport. The dimension of the medium-scale
testbed is 94.4 meters by 26 meters while the dimension of the
large-scale testbed is 608.6 meters by 49.3 meters, which is
about 12 times larger than the medium-scale testbed. We
construct geomagnetic field maps for both testbeds where the
smaller one has 3177 reference points and the larger one has
20088 reference points, each of which are spaced every about
60cm interval.
For comparative evaluation, we have also implemented the
existing RF-based localization schemes. We use BLE
fingerprinting for the medium-scale testbed while we apply Wi-
Fi fingerprinting for the large-scale testbed since its scale
requires too many BLE beacons yet public Wi-Fi signals are
available at the airport. For the RF-based fingerprinting, we also
construct radio maps for both testbeds which have the same
number of reference points as the geomagnetic field maps.
For the geomagnetic-field IPS, we use two RNN models, a
basic RNN model and LSTM model. From the geomagnetic
field maps, we generate millions of traces that simulate various
pedestrian movement paths. 60% of the traces are used for
training, 20% are used for validation, and the remaining 20% are
used for evaluation. With supervised training, we construct a
basic RNN model and an LSTM model for the testbeds by
varying the number of hidden nodes and the number of hidden
layers through repeated experiments. We also vary several
training hyperparameters such as activation functions and
optimization algorithms for the network parameter update to
generate the models. For the RF-based IPS, we use K-NN
mapping which estimates the position from the RF RSS vector
sensed at the current location by computing the weighted sum of
the first K closely matching reference points.
We compare the localization performance of the LSTM
model against that of the basic RNN model as well as that of the
existing RF fingerprinting techniques based on BLE and Wi-Fi.
From the evaluation, with LSTM we could achieve average
positioning errors of 0.80 meters and 2.59 meters for medium
and large scale testbeds. However, this includes start-up errors
since the first few steps may not be enough for LSTM to
uniquely identify the magnetic field vector sequence. Excluding
the start-up errors for the first few steps, we could achieve
average positioning errors of 0.51 meters and 1.04 meters for the
two testbeds. In contrast, the basic RNN model archives the
average positioning errors of 1.20 meters and 4.10 meters for
those two testbeds. By addressing the vanishing gradient
problem, LSTM can remember the geomagnetic vector
sequence deeper in its memory and can outperform the basic
RNN by more than a factor of two for the medium-scale testbed
and by almost a factor of four the large-scale testbed. In addition,
both RNN models substantially improve the localization
performance of the existing RF-based localization schemes,
which could achieve the positioning errors of 3.56 meters and
7.26 meters for the two testbeds even with their extra
infrastructure HW.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
surveys recent studies related to our work. Section III presents
RNN models and the optimization of hyperparameters for our
proposed IPS. Section IV presents the generation of the training
and test data sets for the RNN models including the construction
of the geomagnetic field maps for our testbeds. Section V
discusses the experimental results of the proposed IPS for both
training and inference by varying the experimental parameters
such as the number of hidden nodes and the step count. We also
compare the localization performance of LSTM model against
that of the basic RNN model as well as those of BLE and Wi-Fi
fingerprinting for the testbeds. Finally, Section VI concludes the
paper.
II. RELATED WORKS
Positioning algorithms are generally classified into range-
based and range-free algorithms depending on whether they
rely on distance measurement or not. The range-based
algorithms are further classified into trilateration and
triangularization techniques. Multilateration techniques
including trilateration usually employ ToA or TDoA to locate
the position while triangularization techniques use AoA (Angle
of Arrival). While these are popular in outdoor environment,
they are usually not used in indoor space either due to their high
clock synchronization overhead or due to line of sight (LOS)
requirement.
A. Indoor localization using RF RSS
Instead of conventional trilateration or triangularization
techniques based on ToA, TDoA, or AoA, signal strength
attenuation model [23] can be used to measure the distance in
indoor space. SpotOn [1] is a kind of RF-based IPS that use RF
signal strength. A central server in this system collects the RF
signals to locate the precise position of an object by using an
aggregation algorithm based on trilateration.
More popular approach for indoor localization is RF
fingerprinting based on Wi-Fi or BLE signal strengths. This is
an example of range-free positioning algorithm since the
positioning no longer depends on distance measurement. The
fingerprinting method was first introduced in RADAR [2] where
they first collect Wi-Fi RSSs at pre-determined reference points.
Then, they measure the RSSs of an unknown location and
compare them with the previously collected RSSs to determine
the position. RADAR employs K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN)
algorithm for the positioning, which predicts the current location
by calculating the weighted sum of points of the closely
matching K reference points.
B. Indoor localization using geomagnetic field RSS
A few recent studies [14, 21] proposed geomagnetic field
based IPSs for pedestrians [14] and robots [21] that use the
patterns of a geomagnetic field values as fingerprints for
locations. They survey the magnetic field pattern of a
predetermined path and estimate the position of an object by
calculating similarity between the stored magnetic field pattern
and the measured magnetic field pattern by using the maximum
likelihood function [14, 21]. However, both of previous works
focused on the geomagnetic field pattern of a single main path
and may not cover the complexity of all possible movement
paths of an object as the size of an indoor space increases.
C. Indoor localization using artificial neural networks
Several existing studies [15, 16] have applied artificial neural
networks (ANN) to RF-based IPS. In [15] they use a simple 3-
layer feedforward neural network with one input layer, one
hidden layer and one output layer. With RSS values of a single
location as an input and 2-D coordinate value as output, they
demonstrate that they can outperform the localization
performance of the existing RF-based localization scheme
which simply computes the nearest neighbor instead of K-NN.
CiFi [16] uses a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to
process AoA images. They estimate AoA values from channel
state information (CSI), which are extracted from 960 Wi-Fi
packets. Then, they construct 16 images from 960 AoA values.
Then, AoA images are used as inputs to the DCNN to estimate
the location. They could achieve better localization accuracy
compared to three existing localization schemes based on CSI.
However, both of the existing ANN based IPS studies [15, 16]
using RF signals show localization errors of only about 3 meters
on average even in very small testbeds with less than or equal to
100 meter square dimension.
III. RNN MODELS FOR THE PROPOSED IPS
A. Architecting ANN for IPS based on the geomagnetic field
There are many types of artificial neural networks including
feedforward neural networks (FNN), convolutional neural
networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Among
these networks, we choose RNN. RNN uses present and past
input data to deduce an output. Because of this feature, RNN is
good at recognizing continuous time-varying sequence data such
as voice, audio and video data stream. Our indoor localization
also needs to recognize continuous time-varying sequence data.
There are several variations of RNNs such as basic RNN, bi-
directional RNN, GRU [17] and LSTM [13]. Our previous study
[11] used basic RNN, but in this paper we employ LSTM. It is
due to the vanishing gradient problem that is associated with the
basic RNN. As discussed in Section I, the gradient in the basic
RNN model blows up or decays exponentially over time during
back-propagation. This causes RNN to lose information from
the past input data as the depth of the RNN layers increases,
substantially degrading its train performance. LSTM solve this
problem by adding the cell state.
Figure 1. LSTM architecture
Figure 1 shows the LSTM cell architecture and how each
gate in the cell is connected with other gates and how each cell
is connected with cells in the previous and the next layer. Given
an input sequence x = (x1, . . . , xT ), LSTM computes the hidden
vector sequence h = (h1, . . . , hT ) and output vector sequence y
= (y1, . . . , yT ) by iterating the following equations from t = 1 to
T:
it = σ ( Wxi xt + Whi ht-1 + bi )
ft = σ ( Wxf xt + Whf ht-1 + bf )
ot = σ ( Wxo xt + Who ht-1 + bo )
ct = ft ⊙ct-1 + it ⊙ tanh ( Wxc xt + Whc ht-1 + bc )
ht = ot ⊙ tanh(ct)
yt = A ( Why ht + by )
where W terms denote weight matrices (e.g. Wxh is the input-
hidden weight matrix), b terms denote bias vectors (e.g. b h is
hidden bias vector), σ is the logistic sigmoid function, ⊙ denotes
the inner product operation, A denotes the activation function of
the output layer, and i, f, o and c are respectively the input gate,
forget gate, output gate and cell activation vectors, all of which
are the same size as the hidden vector h.
In order to use LSTM for our geomagnetic field based IPS,
we use the 3-dimensional geomagnetic field vector x1t, x2t, x3t at
time t as the input and the 2-dimensional coordinate y1t, y2t at
time t as the output of the LSTM model. The 2-dimensional
coordinate output represents the position of a moving object in
the 2-dimensional space.
B. Configuration of training hyperparameters
There are several hyperparameters which should be tuned
for the neural network training. They include those which
specify the structure of the network such as the number of
hidden nodes and the number of hidden layers, as well as those
which determine how the network is trained such as mini-batch
size, the choice of activation function for hidden and output
layer, the selection of the loss function, the choice of an
optimizer for backpropagation and learning rate for an
optimizer, etc. After setting these values, we should set the
maximum number of epochs for the entire training. One epoch
means that the training is performed once for the entire data set.
In our experimentation, we set the maximum number of epochs
to 500 while we vary the number of hidden nodes from 300 to
600 for medium-scale testbed and from 900 to 1200 for large-
scale testbed. We also vary the number of hidden layers from 1
to 3 for both testbeds.
Batch normalization is generally used for more effective
ANN training. Training ANN with a single input data item often
leads to convergence problems while using the entire data set
as a single batch for training would make ANN forget earlier
data’s features. To prevent this problem, we use mini-batch for
training. Since too large or small batch size could lead to the
same problem, we have come up with appropriate batch sizes
through several training sessions.
Activation functions are used for modifying the output of a
hidden or an output node and the selection of the activation
function can affect the training results. We select hyperbolic
tangent as the activation function for the hidden nodes since it
can generally alleviate gradient explosion problem of RNN
model. In contrast, for the activation function of output nodes
we choose the ReLU function since our neural network’s outputs
are greater than or equal to 0.
After input values are fed forward through the neural
network, we need to compare the outputs of the neural network
with the desired outputs, i.e. labels for supervised training. For
comparing outputs with labels, we need to select a loss function.
Because our outputs are 2D coordinates, we need a loss function
which is similar to the Euclidean distance between outputs and
labels. For this purpose, the mean squared error shown in the
equation below is chosen for the loss function.
𝑛
1
Mean Squared Error = ∑(output 𝑖 − label𝑖 )2
𝑛
𝑖=1
The optimizer is an update method of neural network
parameters such as weights and biases during back-propagation.
After calculating the loss function, the optimizer determines
how to update the network parameters by using several
hyperparameters such as the gradient of the loss function,
learning rate, and momentum. The learning rate determines how
much of the gradient should be applied to the ANN weight
adjustment while the momentum is used to speed up the training
by accumulating the previous update history. There are several
optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD), Adam
[18], ADADELTA [19], and Adaptive subgradient method [20],
in which they differ by how they reflect those hyperparameters
on the network parameter update. Among these optimizers, we
use Adam optimizer for our training, which is one of the best
optimizers known to be quite effective. In our experimentation,
it also shows the best training results compared to other
optimizers.
IV. METHODOLOGY
A. Experimental testbeds
We use two testbeds, Hana Square Basement Level 1 Floor
of Korea University Science and Engineering campus and the
1st floor (Gate 9 to 14) of Incheon International Airport. The
physical dimension of Hana Square testbed is 94.4 meters by 26
meters while that of Incheon Airport testbed is 608.6 meters by
49.3 meters. We call Hana Square testbed as the medium-scale
testbed and Incheon Airport testbed as the large-scale testbed.
Figure 2 and 3 show the geomagnetic field maps of our testbeds.
The large-scale testbed is approximately 12 times larger than
the medium-scale testbed. Both testbeds include some empty
spaces, which are actually outdoor or closed space shown in
dark purple color. This makes both testbeds more difficult to
learn by a neural network model because the model should
recognize these blank areas as empty spaces for its localization.
B. Measuring the geomagnetic field vectors
In order to measure the geomagnetic field values, we use the
IMU sensor of a Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone. The IMU
sensor integrates 3 different sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope,
and magnetic sensor, each of which measures its sensor value
in the 3-dimensional X, Y, and Z axes. Using the magnetic field
sensor, we can measure the 3-dimensional components of the
geomagnetic field vector. Because the geomagnetic field vector
depends on the smartphone orientation, if we turn the
smartphone, the axis is changed, which makes the geomagnetic
field values change. It can be fixed by using the orientation
value. The orientation value shows us how much the
smartphone has been rotated by the absolute 3-dimensional
cardinal dimension, namely north, east, south, west, up and
down. This orientation value can be estimated by the
smartphone’s IMU sensor.
Figure 2. Geomagnetic field map of medium-scale (Hana Square) testbed
C. Construction of the geomagnetic field maps
Similar to radio map construction in RF-based
fingerprinting, we need to construct the geomagnetic field maps
for our testbeds. However, geomagnetic field maps are easier to
construct than radio maps. This can be attributed to the
following reasons. First, we only need to collect one
geomagnetic field signal instead of multiple beacon or AP
signals. Second, the geomagnetic field signal is more stable
over time compared to unstable time-varying RF signals. Thus,
signal sampling and calibration is generally faster. Hana Square
testbed has 3177 reference points that are spaced every 60.5cm
interval, while Incheon Airport testbed has 20088 reference
points spaced every 57.5cm interval excluding the blank area.
Using the smartphone’s IMU sensor, we collect the
geomagnetic field vector signals at the reference points and also
records the physical coordinates of the reference points. Figure
2 and 3 illustrate the resultant geomagnetic field maps of our
testbeds using contour lines. Note that the sizes of two maps
shown in the figure do not reflect the relative sizes of the actual
maps. Incheon Airport map should be drawn much larger
compared to Hana Square map.
D. Path data generation for basic RNN and LSTM
To train our RNN models, we should generate a large
number of path data sets, each of which is a sequence of the
Figure 3. Geomagnetic field map of large-scale (Incheon Airport) testbed.
geomagnetic field vectors and its associated coordinate values
for supervised training. The geomagnetic field vector sequence
is used as an input sequence for RNN while the sequence of the
corresponding coordinates is used for the desired output for
RNN supervised training. Each of the path data set is generated
from the geomagnetic field map as follows:
Step 1: Select a random start point among the coordinates in
the magnetic field map.
Step 2: We choose a direction from that start point. Since an
object can move any of 360 degree direction, we select a
random direction out of 360 degree options in order to give
diversity of directions.
Step 3: Go a random distance to that direction. If the path
reaches a wall or a blank area that cannot be entered, at this
point, go to Step 2
Step 4: If the path length reaches the maximum, i.e. 100
coordinate movement, go to the first step and start again until
the number of data sets reaches our demand.
This path generation actually follows a simplified version of
a mobility model called the random way point model [22].
Through this path generation process, we generate 20 million
coordinate movements for Hana Square testbed and 120 million
coordinate movements for Incheon Airport testbed. A single
movement path consists of 100 coordinate movements and it is
the unit of training and test data. Therefore, there are 200,000
data sets for Hana Square testbed and 1,200,000 data sets for
Incheon Airport testbed. 60% of these data sets are used for
training, 20% of the data sets are used for validation and the rest
20% are used for test.
E. Radio map construction and RF fingerprinting
For comparative evaluation, we also implement and test RF
fingerprinting techniques. We use BLE RSS for Hana Square
testbed and Wi-Fi RSS for Incheon Airport testbed. For BLE
fingerprinting we deploy 30 BLE beacons in the Hana Square
testbed while we use the existing Wi-Fi access points available
at the airport since the testbed is too large to cover with our BLE
beacons. First, we collect RF RSSs at pre-determined reference
points which are same with those of the geomagnetic field maps
discussed in Section Ⅳ.D. Then, we measure the RSSs using the
sensors of the smartphone and compare them with the previously
collected RSSs to determine the position. We calculate Euclidian
distance between RSSI vectors to find a reference point with the
closest RSSI vector. We K-NN algorithm for the positioning,
which predicts the current location by calculating the weighted
sum of points of the closely matching K reference points.
Table 1. System Environment
Parameters Tools
CPU Intel i7-6900K 3.2GHz
GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX1080 Ti
RAM DDR3 32GB
OS Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS
Language Python 3.5
Google TensorFlow 1.6
Library Nvidia CUDA Toolkit v9.0
Nvidia cuDNN v7.1
V. EVALUATION
A. HW and SW system framework for deep learning
We use Google TensorFlow 1.6 as our deep learning
framework for RNN models. To accelerate RNN training, we
also use NVDIA GPU with its CUDA Toolkit v9.0 and cuDNN Table 3. Test set result
v7.1 library. Table 1 shows hardware and software system Basic RNN LSTM
environments and deep learning frameworks used for our 1 layer 3 layers 1 layer 3 layers
experimentation. 300 600 300 600 300 600 300 600
Max 28.08 30.51 28.81 28.12 61.42 68.83 10.67 36.01
B. Results Hana
(m)
Min 1.471 0.888 0.745 0.611 0.556 0.301 0.337 0.182
Table 2 summarizes RNN training hyperparameter settings squar
(m)
e
used for our testbeds. Avg. 3.590 2.216 1.860 1.625 1.581 1.350 1.189 0.795
(m)
Table 2. RNN hyperparameters
900 1200 900 1200 900 1200 900 1200
Incheon Max 185.6 110.3 168.8 101.6 247.7 248.7 91.59 130.1
Type Hana Square
Airport Inche (m)
Hidden nodes 300, 600 900,1200 on Min 3.372 3.209 4.083 2.208 1.718 1.085 0.873 0.657
Airp (m)
Hidden layers 1,3
ort Avg. 15.62 8.008 9.836 5.510 4.642 4.518 3.136 2.594
Batch size 300 (m)
Learning rate 0.0005 0.0001
Loss function Mean squared error
optimizer Adam
Activation function tanh/ReLU
Train : validation : test 60% : 20% : 20%
Epochs 500
Path length 100

Figure 4. Training errors of basic RNN (RNN) and LSTM models in
the Hana Square testbed. Figure legend shows the model, the number of
hidden nodes, and the number of hidden layers.
Figure 6. CDF of the test errors of Hana Square and Incheon Airport
Table 3 shows the test set results of two testbeds. With 600
hidden nodes and 3 hidden layers, we could achieve the average
localization error of 0.80 meters and the maximum error of 36.01
meters for LSTM model for Hana Square testbed. In contrast,
we achieve the average localization error of 2.59 meters and the
maximum error of 130.1 meters for Incheon Airport testbed with
1200 hidden nodes and 3 hidden layers. This is due to the fact
that the amount of information that LSTM should learn in
Incheon Airport testbed is much larger than that in Hana Square
testbed. Even though LSTM was trained by 6 times more
training data, there is some loss of information in the LSTM
model, which leads to higher localization errors.
Figure 6 shows the cumulative distribution function (CDF)
of the test errors for two testbeds. From now on we assume 600
hidden nodes and 3 hidden layers for the Hana Square testbed
and 1200 hidden nodes and 3 hidden layers for the Incheon
Airport testbed. As shown in the figure, 97.5% of the test data
has errors of less than 2 meters for the Hana Square testbed and
97.2 % of the test data has errors of less than 5.0 meters for the
Incheon Airport testbed.

Figure 5. Training errors of basic RNN (RNN) and LSTM models in

the Incheon Airport testbed. Figure legend shows the model, the number
of hidden nodes, and the number of hidden layers.
Figure 4 and Figure 5 show the training error by varying the
number of hidden nodes and the number of hidden layers with
basic RNN and LSTM models. As we increase the number of
hidden nodes and the number of hidden layers, we could achieve
higher localization accuracy for both testbeds. A larger number
of hidden nodes are required for the large-scale Incheon Airport
testbed since much larger size of the testbed requires a larger
network capacity. Also, even if we assume the same number of Figure 7. Average localization errors in terms of step count
hidden nodes or the same number of hidden layers, LSTM
models generally converge to much smaller training errors than Figure 7 shows the average localization errors of test data
basic RNN models since LSTM can memorize longer history as sets in terms of step count for two testbeds. As shown in the
we have discussed in Section Ⅰ. Overall, we could achieve the figure, localization errors of the first few steps are much higher
final training errors of 0.58 meters for the medium-scale testbed than the remaining steps. As we have discussed in Section I,
with 600 hidden nodes and 1.92 meters for the large-scale RNN models use the past input sequence to predict the output.
testbed with 1200 hidden nodes on average assuming 3 hidden This causes RNN models to take time to produce the correct
layers for LSTM model. output initially. Therefore, after the first 10 steps for Hana
Square testbed and after the first 20 steps for Incheon Airport
testbed the localization errors converge to a small value for both
testbeds. Since we calculate localization error in every ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
coordinate of a path rather than the final coordinate, these start- This work was supported by the National Research Found
up errors contribute to the larger localization errors. ation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government
Table 4. Test set result without the start-up errors (MSIP) (NRF- 2017R1A2B2009641) and by the MSIT(Ministry
Basic RNN LSTM of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC(Information
1 layer 3 layers 1 layer 3 layers Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2018-
300 600 300 600 300 600 300 600 2015-0-00363) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information
Max 26.89 29.38 26.96 27.89 60.23 65.70 8.816 35.79 & communications Technology Promotion).
(m)
Hana
squar
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