Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 54 ›› Issue (10): 1812-1825.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2025.20250266

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A geomagnetic SLAM method enhanced by multi-source data fusion based on smartphones

Kefan SHAO1(), Zengke LI1(), Meng SUN1, Zhenbin LIU2, Qi WU1   

  1. 1.School of Environment and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China
    2.College of Civil Engineering, Henan University of Engineering, Zhengzhou 451191, China
  • Received:2025-07-14 Revised:2025-09-15 Online:2025-11-14 Published:2025-11-14
  • Contact: Zengke LI E-mail:kefanshao@cumt.edu.cn;zengkeli@yeah.net
  • About author:SHAO Kefan (1998—), male, PhD candidate, majors in multi-sensor fusion and indoor emergency positioning. E-mail: kefanshao@cumt.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42274020);The Science and Technology Planning Project of Jiangsu Province(BE2023692);The National Natural Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China(42304047)

Abstract:

Geomagnetic simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) enables smartphone-based positioning in unknown indoor environments without requiring a pre-established geomagnetic fingerprint database. However, geomagnetic SLAM on smartphones still faces technical bottlenecks, including low inertial positioning accuracy, insufficient adaptability of factor graph optimization (FGO) under dynamic conditions, and performance deterioration in large-space SLAM applications. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an enhanced optimization algorithm for geomagnetic SLAM in large-space indoor environments by designing a variance-based temporal increment mechanism and presenting multi-source data key frames. First, to enhance inertial positioning accuracy, this paper explores the characteristic patterns exhibited during the movement of pedestrians to construct observation equations, and integrate them with geomagnetic environmental information to achieve smartphone-based geomagnetic SLAM. Second, to overcome the insufficient dynamic adaptability of the FGO, a hybrid positioning framework is adopted that combines front-end Kalman filter and back-end FGO, improving timeliness. Meanwhile, a variance-based time series increasing mechanism is designed to dynamically integrate different positioning methods. Third, to alleviate the performance degradation of geomagnetic SLAM in large-space indoor environments, the concept of keyframes and their feature representation is extended along the temporal dimension, effectively alleviating the problem of large-space geomagnetic mismatching. A robust loop detection and matching algorithm is developed using multi-source data, and also a keyframe scoring mechanism is constructed to reduce spatial density and improve computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves reliable geomagnetic SLAM in a large-space indoor loop-closing scene. Compared with standalone inertial positioning and classical geomagnetic SLAM, the proposed enhanced approach reduces the root mean square positioning error by 18%~67%. Moreover, it requires only 22.6% of the keyframes used by the standard approach, while still achieving higher accuracy and smoother localization results. Furthermore, experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of parameter settings on both localization accuracy and runtime, and identify the voxel grid size of basis functions as the primary factor in geomagnetic map construction.

Key words: geomagnetic SLAM, multi-source fusion, inertial positioning, factor graph optimization, extended Kalman filter

CLC Number: