Papers for

indoor navigation developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Bistatic delay improves 3D location of moving targets with fewer Wi-Fi receivers

Bistatic Delay-Doppler Sensing for 3D Target Localization in Distributed Wi-Fi Systems

Abstract: This paper investigates how bistatic delay information improves the observability and localization performance of 3D moving targets in distributed Wi-Fi sensing. Motivated by emerging IEEE 802.11bf WLAN sensing, we consider one transmitter, multiple distributed receivers, and a single target with unknown position and velocity. We compare Doppler-only sensing with delay-Doppler sensing, in which delay-capable receivers provide additional bistatic path-length information for target localization. We derive the Fisher information matrix (FIM) and the position equivalent FIM (EFIM) for both sensing formulations. The resulting observability analysis shows that Doppler-only localization generically requires six receivers, whereas delay-Doppler localization can become locally identifiable with three receivers under non-degenerate geometry. We further study mixed receiver architectures in which only a subset of receivers provides delay estimates. Simulations with Wi-Fi-like bandwidths confirm the transition and quantify the roles of bandwidth, Doppler noise, receiver geometry, and delay-capable receiver availability.

Sun 11 OctInformation Theory
The gist
Tracking moving objects in 3D using Wi-Fi signals usually needs many receivers to get accurate locations. This paper shows that adding a type of timing information called bistatic delay reduces the number of receivers required. The authors compare two approaches—using just the speed of the signal’s Doppler shift versus using both speed and timing information—and find that combining delay and Doppler lets you locate targets with fewer receivers. They back this up with math and computer simulations that mimic Wi-Fi systems.
Open → 2610.15641v1

Interpretable physics-based wiFi localization improves accuracy and prunes access points

Interpretable Physics Informed WiFi Indoor Localization: Learning an Effective Access Point Geometry and Using It to Prune

Abstract: Deep learning models can achieve high accuracy for indoor localization, but their black-box nature limits interpretability and the reuse of learned information. We propose a hierarchical deep learning framework for WiFi fingerprint-based indoor localization that jointly predicts user location and learns an effective geometry of the surrounding access points (APs). Physics-informed decoders infer this geometry directly from RSSI measurements and labelled user positions, without requiring the true AP coordinates during training. The learned geometry is then used to rank and prune APs. On the UJIIndoorLoc dataset, the proposed chained model achieves a mean 3D localization error of 7.07 m, reducing error by 26% to 36% compared with baseline models. Previously published methods evaluated on the same official split report errors 10.6% to 31.0% higher. Pruning 35% or 50% of the APs causes only a small loss in localization accuracy. The inferred geometry also enables Fisher-information-based AP ranking even when fingerprint databases do not contain surveyed AP coordinates. Experiments on the Tampere/TUT and UTSIndoorLoc datasets show that geometry-guided AP selection performs comparably to selectors built directly from labelled data. These results show that physics-informed interpretability can improve indoor localization while also supporting effective feature selection.

Sat 26 SeptArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Indoor location tracking with WiFi signals can be very accurate but often works like a ‘‘black box’’—hard to understand or reuse what it learns. The authors created a model that not only finds where a person is but also figures out the relative positions of WiFi access points without needing those points’ real locations. This understanding helps the model ignore less useful access points without losing much accuracy. Their method performed better on several WiFi indoor location datasets, helping select better features and boost performance while making the system easier to interpret.
Open → 2609.32539v1

VideoReloc improves indoor video localization using tiny semantic maps

VideoReloc: Long-Term Indoor Video Relocalization against a Kilobyte-Scale Semantic Scene Graph

Abstract: Given a compact semantic scene graph, long-term indoor video relocalization estimates a map-frame trajectory after lighting and furniture changes. Visual methods rely on appearance and become unreliable under these changes; localizing one frame at a time from object classes and geometry instead leaves sparse, ambiguous evidence. We introduce VideoReloc, whose adaptive clips use odometry to gather spatial evidence until object and motion criteria are met, adapting query length to the observed scene. Its run-level decision rechecks conflicting placements using evidence accumulated across connected clips, stabilizing the trajectory beyond adjacent-clip tracking. Hypothesis-first registration proposes poses from object triplets and verifies each using clip-wide object centers and box surfaces. Orientation-aware refinement uses box faces, gravity and wall directions to resolve ambiguity in camera orientation and refine the full pose. This reframes sparse-map relocalization as verification of spatially extended video queries, moving discriminative support from stored appearance to temporal context and permitting a 100 kB map of class-labelled boxes. On RIO10 and ReplicaCAD, the all-frame localization success rate at 1 m/10$^\circ$ is 73.5% and 61.1% under causal evaluation, rising to 90.6% and 74.8% with clip closure. The evaluated per-frame scene coordinate regressors reach up to 47.6% and 49.8%, respectively, with maps of 12.6-42 MB. Project page: https://videoreloc.github.io

Fri 18 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Indoor video relocalization means figuring out where you are inside a building using video footage, even if the room looks different over time. The authors created VideoReloc, a method that looks at short video clips instead of single pictures to gather more clues from objects and motion, which helps it find the right location more reliably. It uses a very small map made of simple labels for objects, making it much smaller than typical maps. Tests showed VideoReloc can find locations much better over time despite changes like lighting or furniture being moved.
Open → 2609.21804v1

SlugTrails dataset enables better indoor localization in large buildings

SlugTrails: An Egocentric Benchmark for Floor Plan Localization in Large Buildings

Abstract: Floor-plan-based indoor visual localization enables infrastructure-free positioning, but most methods are developed and evaluated in small residential environments unlike the large public buildings of real deployment. We introduce SlugTrails, a floor plan localization benchmark for large indoor spaces under realistic egocentric sensing: $30$ Hz Aria glasses recordings across three campus buildings and six floors ($22089$ m$^2$ of floor plan outline), CAD-derived floor plans with semantic classes and circulation space masks, and trajectories aligned into the floor plan frame using laser-surveyed anchors. One protocol covers three practical ways of gathering geometry under a limited field of view -- a single walking frame, a stationary multi-view sweep, and a walking stream with odometry -- so methods designed for different regimes are compared on the same buildings and ground truth. Evaluating five representative geometric and learned systems under their native sensing configurations, we find that stock checkpoints (official released weights) are near zero on SlugTrails (at most $0.004$ R@1m30$^{\circ}$ on walking single frames), while fine-tuning on SlugTrails improves every trainable family on all three tasks (e.g., F$^3$Loc $0.0 \rightarrow 0.141$ single-frame and $0.03 \rightarrow 0.66$ sequential), with gains compounding as observations accumulate. The same fine-tuned weights also improve cross-dataset generalization on LaMAR with no LaMAR training (sequential R@1m $0.048 \rightarrow 0.143$ for F$^3$Loc and $0.063 \rightarrow 0.127$ for UnLoc), whereas train-from-scratch on SlugTrails alone stays far below fine-tuning from stock weights -- evidence that floor plan localization is currently limited by indoor data rather than by architecture. We release the dataset, protocols, and tools at https://github.com/Head-inthe-Cloud/SlugTrails.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Finding your exact position inside large buildings using visual information and floor plans is difficult, especially when previous methods mostly worked in small homes. The authors created SlugTrails, a new collection of video and floor plan data from multiple floors of campus buildings, with precise position labels. They tested existing localization methods and found that training them on this new data improves accuracy a lot. This shows that better indoor localization depends on having large, realistic datasets like SlugTrails more than on changing model designs.
Open → 2609.19876v1

Transformer model directly matches images to 3D scans for pose estimation

DRS-VPT: Directly Relocalizing in a Scan with Vision Point Transformers

Abstract: We present DRS-VPT, a feed-forward transformer architecture for foundational image-to-scan registration. Given query images and a reference 3D point cloud, the model predicts the scan pose and point map alongside the poses and point maps of each camera, all expressed in the first camera's frame. It additionally predicts a coarse-to- fine pyramid of per-point and per-pixel features for direct reprojective alignment of the scan to the first image. This formulation unifies downstream tasks such as camera-LiDAR calibration in autonomous driving and indoor camera-to-map relocalization. A single DRS-VPT model achieves state-of-the-art performance for image-to-LiDAR registration in autonomous driving, competitive indoor relocalization without training map-specific weights, and strong zero-shot transfer to unseen environments. We also show qualitatively that the model learns complex scan-to-image projection properties such as occlusion of back-facing points.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Pinpointing the exact position and angle of a camera inside a 3D scan is important for things like self-driving cars and indoor navigation. The authors created a way to use transformers—a type of AI model—to directly connect images to 3D point clouds without needing special tuning for each map. Their model not only figures out where the camera is but also aligns points between the image and the scan. It works well on driving scenes and indoor environments, even ones it hasn’t seen before.
Open → 2609.12557v1