Cross-platform Smartphone Positioning at Museums
This addresses a barrier for developing indoor positioning systems in cultural heritage institutions, though it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation and baseline evaluation.
The paper tackles the lack of publicly available RSS datasets for museum environments by presenting BAR, a novel dataset collected from 90 artworks across 13 rooms using Android and iOS platforms, and provides a baseline classification method.
Indoor Positioning Systems (IPSs) hold significant potential for enhancing visitor experiences in cultural heritage institutions. By enabling personalized navigation, efficient artifact organization, and better interaction with exhibits, IPSs can transform the modalities of how individuals engage with museums, galleries and libraries. However, these institutions face several challenges in implementing IPSs, including environmental constraints, technical limits, and limited experimentation. In other contexts, Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based approaches using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and WiFi have emerged as preferred solutions due to their non-invasive nature and minimal infrastructure requirements. Nevertheless, the lack of publicly available RSS datasets that specifically reflect museum environments presents a substantial barrier to developing and evaluating positioning algorithms designed for the intricate spatial characteristics typical of cultural heritage sites. To address this limitation, we present BAR, a novel RSS dataset collected in front of 90 artworks across 13 museum rooms using two different platforms, i.e., Android and iOS. Additionally, we provide an advanced position classification baseline taking advantage of a proximity-based method and $k$-NN algorithms. In our analysis, we discuss the results and offer suggestions for potential research directions.