Berkeley team explores sound for indoor localization
The global positioning system, or GPS, has its limitations—namely, it cannot work indoors. Potential solutions for indoor positioning continue to fire up the imaginations of scientists. The latest news involves a form of echolocation. MIT Technology Review reported on the approach for indoor localization based on sound. Ruoxi Jia and team at the University of California, Berkeley developed a simple, cheap mechanism, said Technology Review, that can identify rooms based on a relatively small dataset. Their paper describing their system was submitted on July 16 to the arXiv server; authors are Ruoxi Jia, Ming Jin, and Costas J. Spanos of the University of California, Berkeley. They call their system SoundLoc. In their paper, "SoundLoc: Acoustic Method for Indoor Localization without Infrastructure," they described SoundLoc as "a room-level localization system that exploits the intrinsic acoustic properties of individual rooms." Their SoundLoc method is based on the extraction of acoustic features of...