Glow in the Dark: Smartphone Inertial Odometry for Vehicle Tracking in GPS Blocked Environments

Although vehicle location-based services are prevalent outdoors, we are back into darkness in many GPS blocked environments such as tunnels, indoor parking garages, and multilevel flyovers. Existing smartphone-based solutions usually adopt inertial dead-reckoning to infer the trajectory, but low-quality inertial sensors in phones are plagued by heavy noises, causing unbounded localization errors through double integrations for movements. In this paper, we propose VeTorch, a smartphone inertial odometry that devises an inertial sequence learning framework to track vehicles in real time when GPS signal is not available. Specifically, we transform the inertial dynamics from the phone to the vehicle regardless of arbitrary phone’s placement in car, and explore a temporal convolutional network to learn vehicle’s moving dependencies directly from the inertial data. To tackle the heterogeneous smartphone properties and driving habits, we propose a federated learning based active model training mechanism to produce customized models for individual smartphones, without incurring user privacy issues. We implement a highly efficient prototype and conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world traffic datasets collected by a modern ride-hailing platform. Our results outperform the state-of-the-art vehicular inertial dead-reckoning solutions on both accuracy and efficiency.