A case study of pedestrian positioning with UWB and UAV cameras

The development and availability on consumer devices of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have dramatically changed the everyday-life of most of the human population, enabling real time navigation on almost any smart device produced in the last years. However, such strong dependence on the availability of the GNSS limits the further spread of location based services to the areas where GNSS is not available or reliable. Motivated by these considerations, several research groups recently considered the problem of developing alternative positioning systems able to compensate the unavailability of GNSS in certain areas. Similarly, this paper also investigates the performance of certain alternative methods, which aim at partially substitute GNSS. In particular, the positioning performance of an affordable Ultra Wide-Band system is compared with that of a vision approach, based on the use of visual information acquired by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flying over the area of interest. In accordance with the results obtained in our dataset, the drone-based vision system usually allow to obtain better positioning results when the pedestrians are visible in the drone video frames (median 2D positioning error less than 25 cm). Nevertheless, the combination of such strategies shall also be investigated in order to obtain a more robust positioning system.