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Crowdedness spot is a crowded area with an abnormal number of objects. Detecting the crowdedness spots of moving vehicles in an urban area is essential to many applications. An intuitive method is to cluster the objects in areas to get the density information. Unfortunately, the data capturing vehicle mobility possesses some new features, such as highly mobile environments, supremely limited size of sample objects, and nonuniform biased samples, and all these features have raised new challenges that make traditional density-based clustering algorithms fail to retrieve the real clustering property of objects, making the results less meaningful. In this paper, we propose a novel nondensity-based approach called mobility-based clustering. The key idea is that sample objects are employed as “sensors” to perceive the vehicle crowdedness in nearby areas using their instant mobility rather than the “object representatives.” As such, the mobility of samples is naturally incorporated. Several key factors beyond the vehicle crowdedness have been identified, and techniques to compensate these effects are accordingly proposed. Furthermore, taking the detected crowdedness spots as a label of the taxi, we can identify one particular taxi to be a crowdedness taxi that crosses a number of different crowdedness spots. We evaluate the performance of our methods and baseline approaches based on real traffic situations (to retrieve the real traffic crowdedness) and real-life data sets. Finally, the interesting findings are provided for further discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Radio frequency (RF) based technologies play an important role in indoor localization, since Radio Signal Strength (RSS) can be easily measured by various wireless devices without additional cost. Among these, radio map based technologies (also referred as fingerprinting technologies) are attractive due to high accuracy and easy deployment. However, these technologies have not been extensively applied on real environment for two fatal limitations. First, it is hard to localize multiple objects. When the number of target objects is unknown, constructing a radio map of multiple objects is almost impossible. Second, environment changes will generate different multipath signals and severely disturb the RSS measurement, making laborious retraining inevitable. Motivated by these, in this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Line-of-sight radio map matching, which only reserves the LOS signal among nodes. It leverages frequency diversity to eliminate the multipath behavior, making RSS more reliable than before. We implement our system MODLoc based on TelosB sensor nodes and commercial 802.11 NICs with Channel State Information (CSI) as well. Through extensive experiments, it shows that the accuracy does not decrease when localizing multiple targets in a dynamic environment. Our work outperforms the traditional methods by about 60 percent. More importantly, no calibration is required in such environment. Furthermore, our approach presents attractive flexibility, making it more appropriate for general RF-based localization studies than just the radio map based localization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In traditional radio-based localization methods, the target object has to carry a transmitter (e.g., active RFID), a receiver (e.g., 802.11\times detector), or a transceiver (e.g., sensor node). However, in some applications, such as safe guard systems, it is not possible to meet this precondition. In this paper, we propose a model of signal dynamics to allow the tracking of a transceiver-free object. Based on radio signal strength indicator (RSSI), which is readily available in wireless communication, three centralized tracking algorithms, and one distributed tracking algorithm are proposed to eliminate noise behaviors and improve accuracy. The midpoint and intersection algorithms can be applied to track a single object without calibration, while the best-cover algorithm has higher tracking accuracy but requires calibration. The probabilistic cover algorithm is based on distributed dynamic clustering. It can dramatically improve the localization accuracy when multiple objects are present. Our experimental test-bed is a grid sensor array based on MICA2 sensor nodes. The experimental results show that the localization accuracy for single object can reach about 0.8 m and for multiple objects is about 1 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indoor positioning systems have received increasing attention for supporting location-based services in indoor environments. WiFi-based indoor localization has been attractive due to its open access and low cost properties. However, the distance estimation based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is easily affected by the temporal and spatial variance due to the multipath effect, which contributes to most of the estimation errors in current systems. In this work, we analyze this effect across the physical layer and account for the undesirable RSSI readings being reported. We explore the frequency diversity of the subcarriers in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems and propose a novel approach called FILA, which leverages the channel state information (CSI) to build a propagation model and a fingerprinting system at the receiver. We implement the FILA system on commercial 802.11 NICs, and then evaluate its performance in different typical indoor scenarios. The experimental results show that the accuracy and latency of distance calculation can be significantly enhanced by using CSI. Moreover, FILA can significantly improve the localization accuracy compared with the corresponding RSSI approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transceiver-free object tracking is to trace a moving object that does not carry any communication device in an environment with some monitoring nodes predeployed. Among all the tracking technologies, RF-based technology is an emerging research field facing many challenges. Although we proposed the original idea, until now there is no method achieving scalability without sacrificing latency and accuracy. In this paper, we put forward a real-time tracking system RASS, which can achieve this goal and is promising in the applications like the safeguard system. Our basic idea is to divide the tracking field into different areas, with adjacent areas using different communication channels. So, the interference among different areas can be prevented. For each area, three communicating nodes are deployed on the ceiling as a regular triangle to monitor this area. In each triangle area, we use a Support Vector Regression (SVR) model to locate the object. This model simulates the relationship between the signal dynamics caused by the object and the object position. It not only considers the ideal case of signal dynamics caused by the object, but also utilizes their irregular information. As a result, it can reach the tracking accuracy to around 1 m by just using three nodes in a triangle area with 4 m in each side. The experiments show that the tracking latency of the proposed RASS system is bounded by only about 0.26 m. Our system scales well to a large deployment field without sacrificing the latency and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counting the number of RFID tags (cardinality) is a fundamental problem for large-scale RFID systems. Not only does it satisfy some real application requirements, it also acts as an important aid for RFID identification. Due to the extremely long processing time, slotted ALOHA-based or tree-based arbitration protocols are often impractical for many applications, because tags are usually attached to moving objects and they may have left the readers interrogation region before being counted. Recently, estimation schemes have been proposed to count the approximate number of tags. Most of them, however, suffer from two scalability problems: time inefficiency and multiple-reading. Without resolving these problems, large-scale RFID systems cannot easily apply the estimation scheme as well as the corresponding identification. In this paper, we present the Lottery Frame (LoF) estimation scheme, which can achieve high accuracy, low latency, and scalability. LoF estimates the tag numbers by utilizing the collision information. We show the significant advantages, e.g., high accuracy, short processing time, and low overhead, of the proposed LoF scheme through analysis and simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]