(Jul 18) PerfLoc Prize Competition for Development of Smartphone Indoor Localization Apps

With billions in circulation around the world, the smartphone is the most important personal computing and communications device.  PerfLoc was a prize competition organized by NIST for development of smartphone indoor localization apps.  NIST collected a vast repository of smartphone data and made it available to the R&D community to develop indoor localization “algorithms” and to have instant, over-the-web assessment of the effectiveness of these algorithms through the NIST performance evaluation portal.  The finalists achieving the best performance in the offline evaluation phase were invited to NIST to go through live testing of the smartphone “apps” they developed to implement their algorithms.

We present the structure of the PerfLoc Prize Competition and the performance achieved by the algorithms during the offline phase and the finalist apps during live testing at NIST.  The results reveal what level of localization accuracy can be achieved in large buildings that had varying degrees of Wi-Fi coverage, from no coverage at all to buildings with a good density of Wi-Fi access points deployed.