WiWho: wifi-based person identification in smart spaces

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in equipping the objects and environment surrounding users with sensing capabilities. Smart indoor spaces such as smart homes and offices can implement the sensing and processing functionality, relieving users from the need of wearing/carrying smart devices. Enabling such smart spaces requires device-free, effortless sensing of user's identity and activities. Device-free sensing using WiFi has shown great potential in such scenarios, however, a fundamental question of person identification has remained unsolved. In this paper, we present WiWho, a framework that can identify a person from a small group of people in a device-free manner using WiFi. We show that Channel State Information (CSI) used in recent WiFi can identify a person's steps and walking gait. The walking gait being distinguishing characteristics for different people, WiWho uses CSI-based gait for person identification. We demonstrate how step and walk analysis can be used to identify a person's walking gait from CSI, and how this information can be used to identify a person. WiWho does not require a person to carry any device and is effortless since it only requires the person to walk for a few steps (e.g. entering a home or an office). We evaluate WiWho using experiments at multiple locations with a total of 20 volunteers, and show that it can identify a person with average accuracy of 92% to 80% from a group of 2 to 6 people respectively. We also show that in most cases walking as few as 2-3 meters is sufficient to recognize a person's gait and identify the person. We discuss the potential and challenges of WiFi-based person identification with respect to smart space applications.