Outdoor Places of Interest Recognition with WiFi Fingerprint over Mobile Devices

Information related to recognizing the place in which a user is has become crucial to deliver efficient and tailored Location-Based Services (LBSs). Though plenty of solutions exist for recognizing indoor places, almost no idea is present in the literature for recognizing big outdoor places without the GPS employment. Though these solutions assure great accuracy they also have a strong request in terms of energy necessary to achieve such result. This paper proposes a Place of Interest (POI) recognition algorithm called Enhanced-LRACI. It is an evolution of LRACI (Location Recognition Algorithm for automatic Check-In applications), a former work reported in In E-LRACI aims at recognizing big outdoor places only by using WiFi Access Points (APs) over mobile devices (smartphones). The main contributions of this work are: i) it solves the problem of big outdoor POI recognition without using GPS by leveraging on the concept of spot, ii) it proposes a novel fingerprint (FP) algorithm and iii) it outperforms the results obtained by other reference works in terms of recognition accuracy. Performance investigation reported in this paper, carried out on real data acquired over mobile devices (Android smartphones), shows that our proposal is able to correctly recognize big outdoor POIs in 95% of the cases whereas other state of the art papers do not exceed 89%.