Comparison of Drift Reduction Methods for Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Based on a Shoe-Mounted IMU

The 3D position of pedestrians is a physical quantity used in various fields, such as automotive navigation and augmented reality. An inertial navigation system (INS) based pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), hereafter INS-PDR, estimates the relative position of pedestrians using an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Since an INS-PDR integrates the accelerometer signal twice, cumulative errors occur and cause a rapid increase in drifts. Various correction methods have been proposed to reduce drifts. For example, one of the most commonly applied correction method is the zero velocity update (ZUPT). This study investigated the characteristics of the existing INS-PDR methods based on shoe-mounted IMU and compared the estimation performances under various conditions. Four methods were chosen: (i) altitude correction (AC); (ii) step length correction (SLC); (iii) advanced heuristic drift elimination (AHDE); and (iv) magnetometer-based heading correction (MHC). Experimental results reveal that each of the correction methods shows condition-sensitive performance, that is, each method performs better under the test conditions for which the method was developed than it does under other conditions. Nevertheless, AC and AHDE performed better than the SLC and MHC overall. The AC and AHDE methods were complementary to each other, and a combination of the two methods yields better estimation performance.