Heading estimation fusing inertial sensors and landmarks for indoor navigation using a smartphone in the pocket

Principal component analysis (PCA)-based approach for user heading estimation using a smartphone in the pocket suffers from an inaccurate estimation of device attitude, which plays a central role in both obtaining acceleration signals in the horizontal plane and the ultimate global walking direction extraction. To solve this problem, we propose a novel heading estimation approach based on two unscented Kalman filters (UKFs) fusing inertial sensors and landmarks. The first UKF is developed for the recalibration of device attitude estimation. We mathematically derive the measurement equation connecting observed user heading from landmarks with the quaternion vector representing device attitude. To decrease the nonlinearity of the measurement equation and make the filter more robust, we deploy the difference between user heading derived from the landmark and estimation result of PCA-based approach as the observation variable. The second UKF is developed for user heading estimation fusing estimation results of PCA-based approach and observed user headings from landmarks. Besides, we develop a robust landmark identification method by exploiting the acceleration and device pitch patterns, while noisy barometers are no longer required as previous methods. Experiments show that the proposed landmark-aided user heading estimation approach may improve accuracy performance significantly, which is very useful for continuous indoor navigation.