No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present an acoustic localization system for multiple devices. In contrast to systems which localise a device relative to one or several anchor points, we focus on the joint localisation of several devices relative to each other. We present a prototype of our system on off-the-shelf smartphones. No user interaction is required, the phones emit acoustic pulses according to a precomputed schedule. Using the elapsed time between two times of arrivals (ETOA) method with sample counting, distances between the devices are estimated. These, possibly incomplete, distances are the input to an efficient and robust multi-dimensional scaling algorithm returning a position for each phone. We evaluated our system in real-world scenarios, achieving error margins of 15 cm in an office environment.
Euclidean distance matrices (EDMs) are a major tool for localization from distances, with applications ranging from protein structure determination to global positioning and manifold learning. They are, however, static objects which serve to localize points from a snapshot of distances. If the objects move, one expects to do better by modeling the motion. In this paper, we introduce Kinetic Euclidean Distance Matrices (KEDMs)---a new kind of time-dependent distance matrices that incorporate motion. The entries of KEDMs become functions of time, the squared time-varying distances. We study two smooth trajectory models---polynomial and bandlimited trajectories---and show that these trajectories can be reconstructed from incomplete, noisy distance observations, scattered over multiple time instants. Our main contribution is a semidefinite relaxation (SDR), inspired by SDRs for static EDMs. Similarly to the static case, the SDR is followed by a spectral factorization step; however, because spectral factorization of polynomial matrices is more challenging than for constant matrices, we propose a new factorization method that uses anchor measurements. Extensive numerical experiments show that KEDMs and the new semidefinite relaxation accurately reconstruct trajectories from noisy, incomplete distance data and that, in fact, motion improves rather than degrades localization if properly modeled. This makes KEDMs a promising tool for problems in geometry of dynamic points sets.
Euclidean distance matrices (EDM) are matrices of squared distances between points. The definition is deceivingly simple: thanks to their many useful properties they have found applications in psychometrics, crystallography, machine learning, wireless sensor networks, acoustics, and more. Despite the usefulness of EDMs, they seem to be insufficiently known in the signal processing community. Our goal is to rectify this mishap in a concise tutorial. We review the fundamental properties of EDMs, such as rank or (non)definiteness. We show how various EDM properties can be used to design algorithms for completing and denoising distance data. Along the way, we demonstrate applications to microphone position calibration, ultrasound tomography, room reconstruction from echoes and phase retrieval. By spelling out the essential algorithms, we hope to fast-track the readers in applying EDMs to their own problems. Matlab code for all the described algorithms, and to generate the figures in the paper, is available online. Finally, we suggest directions for further research.
In this paper we present a new localization method SMS-LORETA (Simultaneous Multiple Sources- Low Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography), capable to locate efficiently multiple simultaneous sources. The new method overcomes some of the drawbacks of sLORETA (standardized Low Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography). The key idea of the new method is the iterative search for current dipoles, harnessing the low error single source localization performance of sLORETA. An evaluation of the new method by simulation has been enclosed.
Localization based on received signal strength (RSS) has drawn great interest in the wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, we investigate the RSS-based multi-sources localization problem with unknown transmitted power under shadow fading. The log-normal shadowing effect is approximated through Fenton-Wilkinson (F-W) method and maximum likelihood estimation is adopted to optimize the RSS-based multiple sources localization problem. Moreover, we exploit a sparse recovery and weighted average of candidates (SR-WAC) based method to set up an initiation, which can efficiently approach a superior local optimal solution. It is shown from the simulation results that the proposed method has a much higher localization accuracy and outperforms the other
We study the problem of localizing a configuration of points and planes from the collection of point-to-plane distances. This problem models simultaneous localization and mapping from acoustic echoes as well as the notable structure from sound approach to microphone localization with unknown sources. In our earlier work we proposed computational methods for localization from point-to-plane distances and noted that such localization suffers from various ambiguities beyond the usual rigid body motions; in this paper we provide a complete characterization of uniqueness. We enumerate equivalence classes of configurations which lead to the same distance measurements as a function of the number of planes and points, and algebraically characterize the related transformations in both 2D and 3D. Here we only discuss uniqueness; computational tools and heuristics for practical localization from point-to-plane distances using sound will be addressed in a companion paper.