Paving the way with machine learning for seamless indoor–outdoor positioning: A survey

Seamless positioning and navigation requires an integration of outdoor and indoor positioning systems. Until recently, these systems mostly function in-silos. Though GNSS has become a standalone system for outdoors, no unified positioning modality could be found for indoor environments. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals are popular choices though. Increased adoption of different machine learning techniques for indoor–outdoor context detection and localization could be witnessed in the recent literature. The difficulty in precise data annotation, need for sensor fusion, the effect of different hardware configurations pose critical challenges that affect the success of indoor–outdoor (IO) positioning systems. Wireless sensor-based techniques are explicitly programmed, hence estimating locations dynamically becomes challenging. Machine learning and deep learning techniques can be used to overcome such situations and react appropriately by self-learning through experiences and actions without human intervention or reprogramming. Hence, the focus of the work is to present the readers a comprehensive survey of the applicability of machine learning and deep learning to achieve seamless navigation. The paper systematically discusses the application perspectives, research challenges, and the framework of ML (mostly) and DL (a few) based positioning approaches. The comparisons against various parameters like the technology used, the procedure applied, output metric and challenges are presented along with experimental results on benchmark datasets. The paper contributes to bridging the IO localization approaches with IO detection techniques so as to pave the way into the research domain for seamless positioning. Recent advances and hence, possible future research directions in the context of IO localization have also been articulated.