Suppression of performance degradation in traveling direction estimation by using IMU and PCA for PDR

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method to estimate a traveling direction for a pedestrian with a smart phone by using the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and principal component analysis (PCA). Our estimator does not restrict a holding status of the smart phone. It is possible to estimate an attitude of the smart phone based on the IMU filter which makes use of values from sensors embedded in itself. We estimate a traveling direction of the pedestrian based on the PCA by using the output of the filter. However, this method essentially includes an indeterminacy problem which allows a direction reversal because the component of the PCA is non-directed graph. In this paper, we investigate a modified traveling direction estimation method in order to suppress a performance degradation caused by this problem. From experimental results, we show that the proposed estimator outperforms the conventional one.