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Comparative analysis of pseudorange multipath mitigation performance using K-means and Fuzzy c-means clustering techniques

  • Valanon Uaratanawong and Chalermchon Satirapod EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: April 24, 2025
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Abstract

Low satellite signal quality in urban areas is caused by multipath interference resulting from the abundance of various obstacles that limit satellite visibility performance, leading to poor satellite geometry and an increase in dilution of precision (DOP). The chance of encountering multipath significantly increases when receiving reflected signals from non-line-of-sight (NLOS) satellites, causing large positioning errors in pseudorange measurements. Enhanced identification of the multipath error source can improve positioning accuracy. This study first detected and then minimized multipath effects in pseudorange measurements using two unsupervised learning techniques – K-means and Fuzzy c-means (FCM) – which executed clustering across diverse multipath conditions and different combinations of GNSS, handled unlabeled quantitative data, and defined a certain number of clusters. Results indicated comparable performances of the K-means and FCM algorithms, with horizontal positioning accuracy improved by up to 35 % and vertical accuracy enhanced by up to 27 %.


Corresponding author: Chalermchon Satirapod, Mapping and Positioning from Space (MAPS) Technology Research Center, Department of Survey Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand, E-mail: 

  1. Research ethics: Not applicable.

  2. Informed consent: Not applicable.

  3. Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

  4. Use of Large Language Models, AI and Machine Learning Tools: None declared.

  5. Conflict of interest: The authors state no conflict of interest.

  6. Research funding: None declared.

  7. Data availability: Not applicable.

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Received: 2024-11-29
Accepted: 2025-02-25
Published Online: 2025-04-24

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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