Low-Cost Indoor Wireless Fingerprint Location Database Construction Methods: A Review

The fingerprint positioning has achieved remarkable results in indoor localization tasks, but the method usually relies on a large amount of fingerprint data to build a fingerprint database, and the amount and diversity of fingerprint data will directly affect the effectiveness of fingerprint positioning. Since fingerprint acquisition is limited and disturbed by space and time, it consumes a lot of labor and time costs to collect fingerprint data in the localization environment, and wireless fingerprint data is time-sensitive and environment-dependent, and changes in the localization environment will reduce the usability of the existing fingerprint database. The complex and repetitive fingerprint acquisition work seriously affects the feasibility of practical deployment of fingerprint positioning systems in the positioning environment. Therefore, the study of low-cost wireless fingerprint database construction methods has become an inevitable part of promoting the widespread deployment of indoor fingerprint positioning systems. In this paper, we introduce the traditional data augmentation-based approach and the advanced machine learning model-based approach, systematically presenting the underlying models and algorithms of both. The former reviews the application of two traditional data enhancement methods, namely channel propagation models and interpolation or regression, to the construction of low-cost wireless fingerprint databases, while the latter taps into techniques for reducing the cost of fingerprint database construction by combining generative adversarial networks and small-sample learning models with the indoor localization domain. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future research directions for achieving high-performance indoor localization based on low-cost wireless fingerprint databases, and suggest some useful research guidelines.