Real Map Virtualization for Indoor Positioning using Smartphone

Indoor maps are highly essential for indoor positioning and location-based services. People existing in big building such as mall, airport and hospitals leads to rapid growth in location based applications. Todays, typical indoor positioning systems employ a training/positioning model using Wi-Fi fingerprints. While these approaches have practical results in terms of coverage, they require an indoor map, which is rarely available to the user and involves significant training costs. In this paper, we present a virtual map, generated automatically inside user smartphone, which lets the user watching her/himself moving forward, backward, left or right from well-known landmarks on the floor map. This map is generated in the form of rectangle of grid points with no prior information of the actual indoor map; therefore, it is suitable for using it at any building. An indoor positioning system based on Smartphone sensor (Accelerometer and Magnetometer) incorporated with existing APs in the building is used to test the suggested virtual map.