We Hear Your PACE: Passive Acoustic Localization of Multiple Walking Persons

Chao Cai, Henglin Pu, Peng Wang, Zhe Chen, Jun Luo

Abstract: Indoor localization is crucial to enable context-aware applications, but existing solutions mostly require a user to carry a device, so as to actively sense location-discriminating signals. However, many applications do not prefer user involvement due to, e.g., the cumbersome of carrying a device. Therefore, solutions that track user locations passively can be desirable, yet lack of active user involvement has made passive indoor localization very challenging even for a single person. To this end, we propose Passive Acoustic loCalization of multiple walking pErsons (PACE) as a solution for small-scale indoor scenarios: it passively locates users by pinpointing the positions of their footsteps. In particular, PACE leverages both structure-borne and air-borne footstep impact sounds (FIS); it uses structure-borne FIS for range estimations exploiting their acoustic dispersion nature, and it employs air-borne FIS for Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) estimations and person identifications. To combat the low-SNR nature of FIS, PACE innovatively employs domain adversarial adaptation and spectral weighting to ranging/identification and AoA estimations, respectively. We implement a PACE prototype and extensively evaluate its performance in representative environments. The results demonstrate a promising sub-meter localization accuracy with a median error of 30 cm.