A UWindsor team in Electrical and Computer Engineering made a great showing against leading technology universities from around the world at the Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition held recently in Seattle.

Zheng Wu and Bingxin Liu, Masters Candidates in Electrical and Computer Engineering, made up the team Wu et al with their project Particle Filter and Extreme Learning Machine Based Indoor Localization System.

Rashid Rashidzadeh, UWindsor’s Research Centre for Integrated Microsystems Lab Manager, worked with the UWindsor team and says indoor localization is basically GPS for the indoors.

“It has many applications for essentially locating people inside of a building,” he says.

“Our project is looking at security applications, but ultimately it could be used to locate a store in a shopping mall.”

Wu and Liu, under the supervision of engineering professor Majid Ahmadi, helped create an indoor localization system that requires no infrastructure. The UWindsor team can locate people inside of buildings by accessing wifi strength and sensors that are already available in mobile phones.

The UWindsor team, which placed fifth amongst "infrastructure-free" teams,  was the only Canadian team at the event and competed in real-time, to near real-time, against teams from such institutions as MIT, University of Michigan and Oxford. This is the first time UWindsor has participated.

 “We competed against teams whose projects consisted of $20,000 worth of equipment, including a laser and high-tech backpack,” says Wu.

“Considering the competition we were up against, this is a very impressive result.”

Rashidzadeh says funding for the project came from UWindsor’s Cross-Border Institute.

“I think this is an important step toward our goal of establishing UWindsor as the place to go in Canada for security technology,” says Bill Anderson, Ontario Research Chair in Cross-Border Transportation Policy and Director of Cross-Border Institute.