Indoor vibration source estimation using piezoelectric elements

Abstract

In this study, we propose a method to estimate the position of a pedestrian using only the vibrations generated during walking. The vibrations in the floor generated during walking attenuation with distance. Therefore, we focus on the temporal changes in the intensity of each frequency to estimate the distance. With a large amount of training data, the characteristics and environment of the vibration source can be learned, enabling the estimation of previously difficult-to-detect vibration sources. Enter the STFT image generated from the vibration data obtained from the sensor array into the CNN to output the estimated distance. In the experiment, the distance was estimated using multiple piezoelectric elements, and the estimation accuracy of the pedestrian’s position was evaluated. The results showed that the average error rate between the actual stepping points and the estimated human positions was 69.7%. Verification using walking data confirmed that the average error rate was reduced to 36.7%.