No perfect outdoors: towards a deep profiling of GNSS-based location contexts

Abstract

While both outdoor and indoor localization methods are flourishing, how to properly marry them to offer pervasive localizability in urban areas remains open. Recently, proposals on indoor–outdoor detection have made the first step towards such an integration, yet complicated urban environments render such a binary classification incompetent. Fortunately, the latest developments in Android have granted us access to raw GNSS measurements, which contain far more information than commonly derived GPS location indicators. In this paper, we explore these newly available measurements in order to better characterize diversified urban environments. Essentially, we tackle the challenges introduced by the complex GNSS data and apply a deep learning model to identify representations for respective location contexts. We further develop two preliminary applications of our deep profiling: one, we offer a more fine-grained semantic classification than binary indoor– outdoor detection; and two, we derive a GPS error indicator that is more meaningful than that provided by Google Maps. These results are all corroborated by our extensive data collection and trace-driven evaluations.