Semi-Self Representation Learning for Crowdsourced WiFi Trajectories

WiFi fingerprint-based localization has been studied intensively. Point-based solutions rely on position annotations of WiFi fingerprints. Trajectory-based solutions, however, require end-position annotations of WiFi trajectories, where a WiFi trajectory is a multivariate time series of signal features. A trajectory dataset is much larger than a pointwise dataset as the number of potential trajectories in a field may grow exponentially with respect to the size of the field. This work presents a semi-self representation learning solution, where a large dataset C of crowdsourced unlabeled WiFi trajectories can be automatically labeled by a much smaller dataset tilde C of labeled WiFi trajectories. The size of tilde C only needs to be proportional to the size of the physical field, while the unlabeled C could be much larger. This is made possible through a novel ``cut-and-flip'' augmentation scheme based on the meet-in-the-middle paradigm. A two-stage learning consisting of trajectory embedding followed by endpoint embedding is proposed for the unlabeled C. Then the learned representations are labeled by tilde C and connected to a neural-based localization network. The result, while delivering promising accuracy, significantly relieves the burden of human annotations for trajectory-based localization.