MmEye: Super-Resolution Millimeter Wave Imaging

Abstract

RF imaging is a dream that has been pursued for years yet not achieved in the evolving wireless sensing. The existing solutions on WiFi bands, however, either require specialized hardware with large antenna arrays or suffer from poor resolution due to fundamental limits in bandwidth, the number of antennas, and the carrier frequency of 2.4 GHz/5 GHz WiFi. In this article, we observe a new opportunity in the increasingly popular 60-GHz WiFi, which overcomes such limits. We present mmEye, a super-resolution imaging system toward a millimeter-wave camera by reusing a single commodity 60-GHz WiFi radios. The key challenge arises from the extremely small aperture (antenna size), e.g., < 2 cm, which physically limits the spatial resolution. mmEye’s core contribution is a super-resolution imaging algorithm that breaks the resolution limits by leveraging all available information at both the transmitter and receiver sides. Based on the MUSIC algorithm, we devise a novel technique of joint transmitter smoothing, which jointly uses the transmit and receive arrays to boost the spatial resolution while not sacrificing the aperture of the antenna array. Built upon this core, we design and implement a functional system on commodity 60-GHz WiFi chipsets. We evaluate mmEye on different persons and objects under various settings. Results show that it achieves a median silhouette (shape) difference of 27.2% and a median boundary keypoint precision of 7.6 cm, and it can image a person even through a thin drywall. The visual results show that the imaging quality is close to that of commercial products like Kinect, making for the first-time super-resolution imaging available on the commodity 60-GHz WiFi devices.