Motion tracking systems based on optical sensors typically often suffer from issues, such as poor lighting conditions, occlusion, limited coverage, and may raise privacy concerns. More recently, radio frequency (RF)-based approaches using commercial WiFi devices have emerged which offer low-cost ubiquitous sensing whilst preserving privacy. However, the output of an RF sensing system, such as Range-Doppler spectrograms, cannot represent human motion intuitively and usually requires further processing. In this study, MDPose, a novel framework for human skeletal motion reconstruction based on WiFi micro-Doppler signatures, is proposed. It provides an effective solution to track human activities by reconstructing a skeleton model with 17 key points, which can assist with the interpretation of conventional RF sensing outputs in a more understandable way. Specifically, MDPose has various incremental stages to gradually address a series of challenges: First, a denoising algorithm is implemented to remove any unwanted noise that may affect the feature extraction and enhance weak Doppler signatures. Secondly, the convolutional neural network (CNN)-recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture is applied to learn temporal-spatial dependency from clean micro-Doppler signatures and restore key points' velocity information. Finally, a pose optimising mechanism is employed to estimate the initial state of the skeleton and to limit the increase of error. We have conducted comprehensive tests in a variety of environments using numerous subjects with a single receiver radar system to demonstrate the performance of MDPose, and report 29.4mm mean absolute error over all key points positions, which outperforms state-of-the-art RF-based pose estimation systems.
This paper introduces a system that takes radio frequency (RF) signals from an off-the-shelf, low-cost, 77 GHz mm Wave radar and produces an enhanced 3D RF representation of a scene. Such a system can be used in scenarios where camera and other types of sensors do not work, or their performance is impacted due to bad lighting conditions and occlusions, or an alternate RF sensing system like synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is too large, inconvenient, and costly. The enhanced RF representation can be used in numerous applications such as robot navigation, human-computer interaction, and patient monitoring. We use off-the-shelf parts to capture RF signals and collect our own data set for training and testing of the approach. The novelty of the system lies in its use of AI to generate a fine-grained 3D representation of an RF scene from its sparse RF representation which a mm Wave radar of the same class cannot achieve.
Recent years have witnessed increasing research interest in human behavior recognition as it provides attractive applications in various sensing scenarios. Among these encouraging implementations, device-free behavior recognition based on WiFi channel state information (CSI) has attracted significant attention due to the popularity of WiFi devices and abundant channel characteristics from CSI. Meanwhile, the CSI signal provides us with additional benefits because it can propagate through a wall. This through-the-wall and device-free scheme not only enables us to identify specific human actions but also to infer person activities by collecting the data from different rooms. This paper presents a survey on the state-of-art progresses in device-free through-the-wall human behavior recognition based on CSI. Specifically, this paper first introduces the basic concept of CSI and describes the signal variation caused by human behavior. Then, it illustrates that different human behaviors can cause signal transformation. Therefore, the unique map relationship between action and signal variation can be leveraged to recognize human behavior. Next, it provides the general architecture of through-the-wall behavior recognition and highlights its core characteristic. It investigates the state-of-art applications in various scenarios and analyzes specific design schemes and implementations. Afterward, it discusses the various across wall applications and makes a detailed comparison between non-through-the-wall and through-the-wall applications. Meanwhile, it analyzes many factors that affect recognition accuracy and emphasizes performance differences under across wall scenarios. Finally, this paper concludes by summarizing the issues and challenges faced and providing insights into the possible solution and future research trend.
Compared to traditional camera-based computer vision and imaging, radio imaging based on wireless sensing does not require lighting and is friendly to privacy. This work proposes a deep learning radio imaging solution to visualize real-time user indoor activities. The proposed solution uses a low-power, MIMO Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar array to capture the reflected signals from human objects, and then constructs 3D human visualization through a serials of data analytics including: 1) a data preprocessing mechanism to remove background static reflection, 2) a signal processing mechanism to transfer received complex radar signals to a matrix containing spatial information, and 3) a deep learning scheme to filter abnormal frames resulted from rough surface of human body. This solution has been extensively evaluated in an indoor research lab. The constructed real-time human images are compared to the camera images captured at the same time. The results show that the proposed radio imaging solution can result in significantly high accuracy. IEEE publication: "Real-Time Indoor 3D Human Imaging Based on MIMO Radar Sensing" https://doi.org/10.1109/ICME.2019.00244
This paper introduces RF-Pose3D, the first system that infers 3D human skeletons from RF signals. It requires no sensors on the body, and works with multiple people and across walls and occlusions. Further, it generates dynamic skeletons that follow the people as they move, walk or sit. As such, RF-Pose3D provides a significant leap in RF-based sensing and enables new applications in gaming, healthcare, and smart homes. RF-Pose3D is based on a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that performs high-dimensional convolutions by decomposing them into low-dimensional operations. This property allows the network to efficiently condense the spatio-temporal information in RF signals. The network first zooms in on the individuals in the scene, and crops the RF signals reflected off each person. For each individual, it localizes and tracks their body parts - head, shoulders, arms, wrists, hip, knees, and feet. Our evaluation results show that RF-Pose3D tracks each keypoint on the human body with an average error of 4.2 cm, 4.0 cm, and 4.9 cm along the X, Y, and Z axes respectively. It maintains this accuracy even in the presence of multiple people, and in new environments that it has not seen in the training set. Demo videos are available at our website: http://rfpose3d.csail.mit.edu.
Understanding people's actions and interactions typically depends on seeing them. Automating the process of action recognition from visual data has been the topic of much research in the computer vision community. But what if it is too dark, or if the person is occluded or behind a wall? In this paper, we introduce a neural network model that can detect human actions through walls and occlusions, and in poor lighting conditions. Our model takes radio frequency (RF) signals as input, generates 3D human skeletons as an intermediate representation, and recognizes actions and interactions of multiple people over time. By translating the input to an intermediate skeleton-based representation, our model can learn from both vision-based and RF-based datasets, and allow the two tasks to help each other. We show that our model achieves comparable accuracy to vision-based action recognition systems in visible scenarios, yet continues to work accurately when people are not visible, hence addressing scenarios that are beyond the limit of today's vision-based action recognition.
With the fast-growing demand of location-based services in various indoor environments, robust indoor ego-motion estimation has attracted significant interest in the last decades. Single-chip millimeter-wave (MMWave) radar as an emerging technology provides an alternative and complementary solution for robust ego-motion estimation. This paper introduces Milli-RIO, a MMWave radar based solution making use of a fixed beam antenna and inertial measurement unit sensor to calculate 6 degree-of-freedom pose of a moving radar. Detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations prove that the proposed method achieves precisions on the order of few centimetres for indoor localization tasks.
WiFi human sensing has achieved great progress in indoor localization, activity classification, etc. Retracing the development of these work, we have a natural question: can WiFi devices work like cameras for vision applications? In this paper We try to answer this question by exploring the ability of WiFi on estimating single person pose. We use a 3-antenna WiFi sender and a 3-antenna receiver to generate WiFi data. Meanwhile, we use a synchronized camera to capture person videos for corresponding keypoint annotations. We further propose a fully convolutional network (FCN), termed WiSPPN, to estimate single person pose from the collected data and annotations. Evaluation on over 80k images (16 sites and 8 persons) replies aforesaid question with a positive answer. Codes have been made publicly available at https://github.com/geekfeiw/WiSPPN.
Fine-grained person perception such as body segmentation and pose estimation has been achieved with many 2D and 3D sensors such as RGB/depth cameras, radars (e.g., RF-Pose) and LiDARs. These sensors capture 2D pixels or 3D point clouds of person bodies with high spatial resolution, such that the existing Convolutional Neural Networks can be directly applied for perception. In this paper, we take one step forward to show that fine-grained person perception is possible even with 1D sensors: WiFi antennas. To our knowledge, this is the first work to perceive persons with pervasive WiFi devices, which is cheaper and power efficient than radars and LiDARs, invariant to illumination, and has little privacy concern comparing to cameras. We used two sets of off-the-shelf WiFi antennas to acquire signals, i.e., one transmitter set and one receiver set. Each set contains three antennas lined-up as a regular household WiFi router. The WiFi signal generated by a transmitter antenna, penetrates through and reflects on human bodies, furniture and walls, and then superposes at a receiver antenna as a 1D signal sample (instead of 2D pixels or 3D point clouds). We developed a deep learning approach that uses annotations on 2D images, takes the received 1D WiFi signals as inputs, and performs body segmentation and pose estimation in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results on over 100000 frames under 16 indoor scenes demonstrate that Person-in-WiFi achieved person perception comparable to approaches using 2D images.
Most computer vision systems and computational photography systems are visible light based which is a small fraction of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. In recent years radio frequency (RF) hardware has become more widely available, for example, many cars are equipped with a RADAR, and almost every home has a WiFi device. In the context of imaging, RF spectrum holds many advantages compared to visible light systems. In particular, in this regime, EM energy effectively interacts in different ways with matter. This property allows for many novel applications such as privacy preserving computer vision and imaging through absorbing and scattering materials in visible light such as walls. Here, we expand many of the concepts in computational photography in visible light to RF cameras. The main limitation of imaging with RF is the large wavelength that limits the imaging resolution when compared to visible light. However, the output of RF cameras is usually processed by computer vision and perception algorithms which would benefit from multi-modal sensing of the environment, and from sensing in situations in which visible light systems fail. To bridge the gap between computational photography and RF imaging, we expand the concept of light-field to RF. This work paves the way to novel computational sensing systems with RF.
Skeleton-based human action recognition has recently drawn increasing attentions with the availability of large-scale skeleton datasets. The most crucial factors for this task lie in two aspects: the intra-frame representation for joint co-occurrences and the inter-frame representation for skeletons' temporal evolutions. In this paper we propose an end-to-end convolutional co-occurrence feature learning framework. The co-occurrence features are learned with a hierarchical methodology, in which different levels of contextual information are aggregated gradually. Firstly point-level information of each joint is encoded independently. Then they are assembled into semantic representation in both spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, we introduce a global spatial aggregation scheme, which is able to learn superior joint co-occurrence features over local aggregation. Besides, raw skeleton coordinates as well as their temporal difference are integrated with a two-stream paradigm. Experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms other state-of-the-arts on action recognition and detection benchmarks like NTU RGB+D, SBU Kinect Interaction and PKU-MMD.