Hierarchical Grid System for Mobile Device Location Accuracy
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing location determination systems, such as GPS, provide insufficient information about a mobile device's location within specific geographical regions, as they only offer coordinates without indicating whether the device is within a particular region with known properties, such as a store, home, or commercial district, and are computationally intensive due to methods like Ray Casting.
Innovation Solution
A computationally efficient method and system using a hierarchical grid system to determine if a mobile device is within a predetermined geographical boundary by converting location coordinates to cell identifiers, allowing for efficient searching within a set of cell identifiers associated with regions, reducing the number of cells and improving precision through different resolution levels.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If Ray Casting method is used to determine whether a point is within a polygon, then the accuracy of region determination is improved, but the computational complexity increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the geographical space into a hierarchical grid system where the earth's surface is segmented into cells of varying resolutions. This segmentation allows the complex problem of determining whether a point is within an arbitrary polygon to be simplified into checking whether a point falls within predefined grid cells that have been pre-determined to be inside or outside the polygon boundaries.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary actions by pre-processing the polygon boundaries and determining which grid cells fall within each polygon before actual queries are made. This pre-computation stores the spatial relationships in advance, so that during operation, the system only needs to perform simple lookups rather than complex geometric calculations for each query.
2Measurement precision
If high resolution grid system is used to improve location precision, then the measurement precision of device location is improved, but the quantity of cells increases leading to higher computational complexity
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a dynamic resolution system where the grid cell size automatically adjusts based on the location and requirements. Areas requiring higher precision have finer grid resolution, while less critical areas use coarser resolution. This dynamic adaptation allows the system to maintain high precision where needed while minimizing the total number of cells to manage computational efficiency.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different grid resolutions to different geographical regions based on local requirements. High-resolution grids are applied only to areas where precise location determination is critical, while lower-resolution grids are used in other areas. This local differentiation optimizes the balance between precision and computational resources.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods to identify a region in which a mobile device is located, by: applying device attributes of the mobile device and region attributes of coordinates of the mobile device to a predictive model to generate an accuracy indicator, identifying a plurality of locations from the coordinates of the mobile device that represent one point and the accuracy indicator, converting coordinates of the locations to cell identifiers of a grid reference system, determining region(s) containing the locations by finding matching cell identifiers that are pre-associated with the region(s), and determining a confidence level of a region that contains at least a portion of the locations based on the weights of locations in the portion. The region is identified in response to a determination that the confidence level is above a threshold.