The ubiquity of sensor-rich smartphones provides opportunities for a low-cost method to track indoor pedestrians. In this situation, pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is a widely used technology; however, its cumulative error seriously affects its accuracy. This paper presents a method of combining infrastructure-free indoor acoustic self-positioning with PDR self-positioning, which verifies the rationality of PDR results through the acoustic constraint between a sound source and its image sources. We further determine the first-order echo delay measurements, thus obtaining the mobile user position. We verify that the proposed method can achieve a continuous self-positioning median error of 0.19 m, and the error probability below 0.12 m is 54.46%, which indicates its ability to eliminate PDR error, as well as its adaptability to environmental disturbances.
Keywords: acoustic image model; indoor acoustic localization; motion dynamics information; pedestrian dead reckoning; smartphone-based self-positioning.