Machine-learning-based system for multi-sensor 3D localisation of stationary objects

Localisation of objects and people in indoor environments has been widely studied due to security issues and because of the benefits that a localisation system can provide. Indoor positioning systems (IPSs) based on more than one technology can improve localisation performance by leveraging the advantages of distinct technologies. This study proposes a multi-sensor IPS able to estimate the three-dimensional (3D) location of stationary objects using off-the-shelf equipment. By using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, machine-learning models based on support vector regression (SVR) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) are proposed. A k-means technique is also applied to improve accuracy. A computer vision (CV) subsystem detects visual markers in the scenario to enhance RFID localisation. To combine the RFID and CV subsystems, a fusion method based on the region of interest is proposed. We have implemented the authors’ system and evaluated it using real experiments. On bi-dimensional scenarios, localisation error is between 9 and 29 cm in the range of 1 and 2.2 m. In a machine-learning approach comparison, ANN performed 31% better than SVR approach. Regarding 3D scenarios, localisation errors in dense environments are 80.7 and 73.7 cm for ANN and SVR models, respectively