Radio Biometrics: Human Recognition Through a Wall

Abstract

In this paper, we show the existence of human radio biometrics and present a human identification system that can discriminate individuals even through the walls in a non-line-of-sight condition. Using commodity Wi-Fi devices, the proposed system captures the channel state information (CSI) and extracts human radio biometric information from Wi-Fi signals using the time-reversal (TR) technique. By leveraging the fact that broadband wireless CSI has a significant number of multipaths, which can be altered by human body interferences, the proposed system can recognize individuals in the TR domain without line-of-sight radio. We built a prototype of the TR human identification system using standard Wi-Fi chipsets with $3 \times 3$ multi-in multi-out (MIMO) transmission. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated and validated through multiple experiments. In general, the TR human identification system achieves an accuracy of 98.78% for identifying about a dozen of individuals using a single transmitter and receiver pair. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of Wi-Fi, the proposed system shows the promise for future low-cost low-complexity reliable human identification applications based on radio biometrics.