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In this paper, we develop a foot‐mounted pedestrian navigation system prototype with the emphasis on distance measuring with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) which implies the characteristics of pedestrian gait cycle and thus can be used as a crucial step indicator for distance calculation. Conventional methods for step detection and step length estimation cannot adapt well to the general pedestrian applications since the parameters in these methods may vary for different persons and motions. In this paper, an adaptive time‐ and frequency‐domains joint distance measuring method is proposed by utilizing the means of behaviors classification. Two key issues are studied: step detection and step length determination. For the step detection part, first behavior classification along with state transition strategy is designed to identify typical pedestrian behaviors including standing still, walking, running and irregular swing. Then a four‐stage step detection method is proposed to adaptively determine both step frequency and threshold in a flexible window. Based on the behavior classification results, a two‐segment functional based step length model is established to adapt the walking and running behaviors. Finally, real experiments are carried out to verify our proposed step detection method and step length model. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing representative methods and it exhibits the merits of accuracy and adaptability for different persons in real time and significantly improves the accuracy of distance measuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]