WiReader: Adaptive Air Handwriting Recognition Based on Commercial WiFi Signal

Abstract

In recent years, with the rapid development of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, many intelligent sensing applications have emerged, which realize contactless sensing and human-computer interaction (HCI). Handwriting recognition is the communication link between the human and computer. Previous handwriting recognition applications are usually founded on images and sensors, which require significant device overhead and are device dependent. Recently, the revolution of the wireless signal sensing technology has laid the foundation for the intelligent handwriting recognition technology without devices. In this article, we propose WiReader, an adaptive air handwriting recognition system based on wireless signals. WiReader utilizes ubiquitous commercial WiFi devices to process the collected channel state information (CSI), segments the data in combination with activity factors, and then transforms the original signal using the CSI-Ratio model. In order to address the problem of feature extraction caused by handwriting, we utilize the cumulative principal components and multilayer wavelet transform for the transformed signal. Finally, the energy feature matrix is generated and combines with long short-term memory (LSTM) to realize the recognition of different handwriting actions. Extensive real-world experiments show that WiReader achieves an average recognition accuracy of 90.64% leading other applications in three scenarios and has strong robustness to user location, user diversity, and different scenarios.