Passive Channel Charting: Locating Passive Targets using a UWB Mesh

Fingerprint-based passive localization enables high localization accuracy using low-cost UWB IoT radio sensors. However, fingerprinting demands extensive effort for data acquisition. The concept of channel charting reduces this effort by modeling and projecting the manifold of {csi} onto a 2D coordinate space. So far, researchers only applied this concept to active radio localization, where a mobile device intentionally and actively emits a specific signal. In this paper, we apply channel charting to passive localization. We use a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) system to estimate a target's velocity and derive a distance matrix from it. We then use this matrix to learn a distance-preserving embedding in 2D space, which serves as a fingerprinting model. In our experiments, we deploy six nodes in a fully connected ultra-wideband (UWB) mesh network to show that our method achieves high localization accuracy, with an average error of just 0.24\,m, even when we train and test on different targets.