Research Article Performance Evaluation of Pedestrian Locations Based on Contemporary Smartphones Jalal Ibrahim Al-Azizi and Helmi Zulhaidi Mohd Shafri Department of Civil Engineering and Geospatial Information Science Research Centre (GISRC), Faculty of Engineering, University Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Malaysia Correspondence should be addressed to Helmi Zulhaidi Mohd Shafri; helmi@upm.edu.my Received 8 August 2016; Revised 8 November 2016; Accepted 29 November 2016; Published 13 February 2017 Academic Editor: Letizia Lo Presti Copyright © 2017 Jalal Ibrahim Al-Azizi and Helmi Zulhaidi Mohd Shafri. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Nowadays, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) unit is embedded in nearly every smartphone. Tis unit allows a smartphone to detect the user’s location and motion, and it makes functions, such as navigation, tracking, and compass applications, available to the user. Terefore, the GNSS unit has become one of the most important features in modern smartphones. However, because most smartphones incorporate relatively low-cost GNSS chips, their localization accuracy varies depending on the number of accessible GNSS satellites, and it is highly dependent on environmental factors that cause interference such as forests and buildings. Tis research evaluated the performance of the GNSS units inside two diferent models of smartphones in determining pedestrian locations in diferent environments. Te results indicate that the overall performances of the two devices were related directly to the environment, type of smartphone/GNSS chipset, and the application used to collect the information. 1. Introduction Tese days many diferent brands and models of smartphone are available on the market. Most of these smartphones incorporate diferent types of embedded sensors such as GNSS receivers, Radio-Frequency Identifcation, a camera, and an inertial platform [1]. Tese devices could be used to provide seamless integration of three positioning tech- nologies: the Assisted Global Positioning System (A-GPS), WiFi positioning, and cellular network positioning [2]. Tus, positional information could be obtained at almost every moment and in almost every location, which has led to an increase in the number of available navigation and location based applications. Numerous studies have been conducted testing smart- phones as navigational and/or tracking systems. However, less attention has been paid to pedestrian navigation. Klimaszewski-Patterson [3] compared the GPS capabilities between a smartphone (HTC G1 Dream) and dedicated GPS (Trimble Juno SB) device. Gikas et al. [4] concluded that positioning sensors embodied in modern smartphones, such as the HTC One S and iPhone 5S, can provide accu- racy metrics of sufciently high accuracy for a variety of intelligent transportation system applications. Kos and Brˇ ci´ c [5] considered weather and ionospheric conditions when studying the horizontal positioning performance of two identical smartphone devices and found distinct diferences in horizontal positioning accuracy. Bauer [6] proved that the accuracy of smartphone posi- tioning depends on the application. In her study, nine popular applications were run on a single smartphone and used to take measurements on a running track. Bauer’s results showed diferent outputs for each application, indicating that GPS accuracy is afected by various infuencing factors. Menard et al. [7] used three diferent smartphones (each with an embedded GPS sensor) and analyzed their positional capability when vehicle tracking. Each of the three smart- phones was accurate to within 10 m about 95% of the time. Zhang et al. [8] evaluated high sensitivity GPS and mobile phones (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, Nokia N95, and HP iPAQ) in three scenarios: urban canyon, shopping center, and an area under dense tree foliage in kinematic mode. One of their Hindawi International Journal of Navigation and Observation Volume 2017, Article ID 6750346, 10 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/6750346