Robust Light-weight Magnetic-based Door Event Detection with Smartphones

Doors as densely-deployed natural landmarks play an important role in improving indoor positioning systems. However, the state-of-the-art door event detection works are based on either vision or infrastructure, thus incurring non-trivial device or management cost. To address these problems, we present a Light-weight Magnetic-based Door Event Detection method, called LMDD. It leverages built-in magnetic sensors of common smartphones to achieve infrastructure-free door event detection. After analyzing the special features of sensorsu0027 readings changes caused by the door, we design LMDD scheme with three main components, including data acquisition, events identification and events denoising. Moreover, an improved and robust door event detection framework based on a majority-voting model is proposed to fuse multiple-dimensional sensing data from non-magnetic built-in sensors. We have implemented a prototype of LMDD on Android-based platform. Experimental results show that LMDD with only magnetic sensor achieves door event detection accuracy of around 80% on average, ranging from 70% to 87% in various typical indoor environments. The enhanced LMDD based on the fusion of heterogeneous sensors can achieve a much higher door event detection accuracy of 90% on average.