ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2022-839-2022 A COMPARISON BETWEEN UWB AND LASER-BASED PEDESTRIAN TRACKING Masiero A. 1 Dabove P. 2 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9646-523X Di Pietra V. 2 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7501-1183 Piragnolo M. 3 Vettore A. 3 Guarnieri A. 3 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9483-289X Toth C. 4 Gikas V. 5 Perakis H. 5 Chiang K.-W. 6 Ruotsalainen L. M. 7 Goel S. 8 Gabela J. 9 University of Florence, Italy Politecnico di Torino, Italy University of Padova, Italy The Ohio State University, USA National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan University of Helsinki, Finland Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India TU Wien-Vienna University of Technology, Austria 30 05 2022 XLIII-B2-2022 839 844 Copyright: © 2022 A. Masiero et al. 2022 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2022-839-2022.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2022-839-2022.pdf

Despite the availability of GNSS on consumer devices enabled personal navigation for most of the World population in most of the outdoor conditions, the problem of precise pedestrian positioning is still quite challenging when indoors or, more in general, in GNSS-challenging working conditions. Furthermore, the covid-19 pandemic also raised of pedestrian tracking, in any environment, but in particular indoors, where GNSS typically does not ensure sufficient accuracy for checking people distance. Motivated by the mentioned needs, this paper investigates the potential of UWB and LiDAR for pedestrian positioning and tracking. The two methods are compared in an outdoor case study, nevertheless, both are usable indoors as well. The obtained results show that the positioning performance of the LiDAR-based approach overcomes the UWB one, when the pedestrians are not obstructed by other objects in the LiDAR view. Nevertheless, the presence of obstructions causes gaps in the LiDAR-based tracking: instead, the combination of LiDAR and UWB can be used in order to reduce outages in the LiDAR-based solution, whereas the latter, when available, usually improves the UWB-based results.