Overview

Wireless localization estimates where people, devices, or radio transmitters are using measurements such as Wi-Fi and BLE fingerprints, channel state information, angle of arrival, and UWB ranges. Methods range from geometric solvers and Kalman filters to deep sequence models, foundation models, and radio-map or ray-tracing approaches; many combine radio data with inertial, visual, or map information. These techniques can provide positioning indoors, in cities, or where satellite navigation is unreliable, and are evaluated on fingerprint datasets, simulated propagation scenes, and real deployments. A central challenge is maintaining accurate, trustworthy estimates under multipath, obstructions, sparse measurements, and changes in environment without requiring extensive site-specific training or infrastructure.

Latest papers

65 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, down 36% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Dec 8, 2025

Radiance-Field Guided Pretraining: Scaling Localization Models with Unlabeled Wireless Signals

Radio frequency (RF)-based indoor localization offers significant promise for applications such as indoor navigation, augmented reality, and pervasive computing. While deep learning has greatly enhanced localization accuracy and robustness, existing localization models still face major challenges in cross-scene generalization due to their reliance on scene-specific labeled data. To address this, we introduce Radiance-Field Reinforced Pretraining (RFRP). This novel self-supervised pretraining framework couples a large localization model (LM) with a neural radio-frequency radiance field (RF-NeRF) in an asymmetrical autoencoder architecture. In this design, the LM encodes received RF spectra into latent, position-relevant representations, while the RF-NeRF decodes them to reconstruct the original spectra. This alignment between input and output enables effective representation learning using large-scale, unlabeled RF data, which can be collected continuously with minimal effort. To this end, we collected RF samples at 7,327,321 positions across 100 diverse scenes using four common wireless technologies--RFID, BLE, WiFi, and IIoT. Data from 75 scenes were used for training, and the remaining 25 for evaluation. Experimental results show that the RFRP-pretrained LM reduces localization error by over 40% compared to non-pretrained models and by 21% compared to those pretrained using supervised learning.
Nov 21, 2025

Self-Localizing MIMO Beam Mapping with Continuously Evolving Channel Memory

Machine learning has greatly advanced data-driven channel modeling and resource optimization. However, most existing methods require accurately location-labeled datasets, which are costly to collect and maintain in dynamic environments. This paper develops a self-localizing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beam map framework that constructs a hierarchical wireless memory from highly sparse channel state information (CSI) measurements without explicit location labels. To reduce acquisition and processing overhead, we use beamdomain received signal strength (RSS) as compact inputs and theoretically show that they enable asymptotically unbiased spatial signature estimation. A dual-scale extractor captures intrasnapshot angular dependencies and inter-sample correlations for incomplete observations, and a hybrid temporal encoder is designed to consolidate recent CSI into stable short-term context for physical anchor inference. The inferred anchors spatially index a physically structured radio map embedding that stores long-term channel knowledge, which conditions a diffusion decoder for location-consistent full CSI reconstruction. Such a radio map embedding provides a persistent wireless knowledge representation that can be continuously updated and reused without full CSI acquisition. Experiments show that the proposed framework improves physical-anchor recovery accuracy by over 30% under sparse measurements and achieves more than 20% channel-capacity gain in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) beam tracking over Kalman-filter-based methods.
Oct 21, 2025

Deep Learning-Enhanced Real-Time Wi-Fi Sensing Through Single Transceiver Pair

The advancement of next-generation Wi-Fi technology heavily relies on sensing capabilities, which play a pivotal role in enabling sophisticated applications. In response to the growing demand for large-scale deployments, contemporary Wi-Fi sensing systems strive to achieve high-precision perception while maintaining minimal bandwidth consumption and antenna count requirements. Remarkably, various deep learning-driven perception technologies have demonstrated the ability to surpass conventional resolution limits. However, the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon have not been thoroughly investigated in existing research. We find that under hardware-constrained conditions, the performance gains of deep learning in Wi-Fi sensing primarily originate from two aspects: prior information and temporal correlation, which act as specific forms of side information that reduce the estimation error bound. We construct a deep learning-based Wi-Fi sensing system using only a single transceiver pair and design experiments to validate these gains. The system achieves an average human pose estimation error of 0.2189 m and an average localization error of 0.6124 m, while operating in real time at 42 fps on commodity hardware.
Sep 21, 2025

Initialization-Free LEO Doppler Positioning via Semidefinite Relaxation: A Cold-Start Approach

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite Doppler measurements offer an alternative source of positioning information for Internet of Things devices when Global Navigation Satellite System signals are unavailable. Conventional local optimisation methods depend on an accurate initial position and can fail during a complete cold start. We propose an initialization-free LEO Doppler positioning framework based on semidefinite relaxation. The method reformulates the nonlinear positioning problem into a semidefinite programme to obtain a receiver position estimate without prior location knowledge. We analyse relaxation tightness under noiseless conditions and derive sufficient noise bounds under parameter disturbances. Simulations and field experiments using opportunistic Iridium-NEXT signals evaluate initialization sensitivity, positioning accuracy and computational cost. In the field experiment, the proposed method achieves a three-dimensional positioning error of 140 m without an initial position, whereas local solvers converge to poor solutions under large initial offsets. Using the semidefinite estimate to initialise Gauss-Newton or Dog-Leg reduces the positioning error to 130 m. The framework provides a cold-start initialization stage for subsequent local refinement in opportunistic LEO positioning. The implementation and datasets are publicly available to support reproducibility and further research.
May 12, 2025

Graph-Based Floor Separation Using Node Embeddings and Clustering of WiFi Trajectories

Indoor positioning systems (IPSs) are increasingly vital for location-based services in complex multi-storey environments. This study proposes a novel graph-based approach for floor separation using Wi-Fi fingerprint trajectories, addressing the challenge of vertical localization in indoor settings. We construct a graph where nodes represent Wi-Fi fingerprints, and edges are weighted by signal similarity and contextual transitions. Node2Vec is employed to generate low-dimensional embeddings, which are subsequently clustered using K-means to identify distinct floors. Evaluated on the Huawei University Challenge 2021 dataset, our method outperforms traditional community detection algorithms, achieving an accuracy of 68.97%, an F1- score of 61.99%, and an Adjusted Rand Index of 57.19%. By publicly releasing the preprocessed dataset and implementation code, this work contributes to advancing research in indoor positioning. The proposed approach demonstrates robustness to signal noise and architectural complexities, offering a scalable solution for floor-level localization.