A passive fingerprinting approach for device-free surveillance and localization applications using a Bluetooth Low Energy infrastructure

Passive, device-free indoor localization is a research field that has drawn the attention of many researchers in the last years. Existing solutions that do not require an active device at the target, do not fulfil the requirements of reliability, cost and power efficiency and accurate localization at the same time. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a passive, device-free fingerprinting method based on Bluetooth Low Energy. This method takes advantage of the highly configurable and fully connected mesh network of a custom sensor platform. The measurements of the Received Signal Strength values are carried out within a pre-defined network topology. It will be shown that the proposed passive fingerprinting approach does not need recalibration and its median localization error of 1.2 m is constant while using both old and updated calibration data. This is verified by extensive measurements using an experimental setup.