COTS WiFi Devices Research Articles

Wi-Painter

WiFi has gradually developed into one of the main candidate technologies for indoor environment sensing. In this paper, we are interested in using COTS WiFi devices to identify material details, including location, material type, and shape, of stationary objects in the surrounding environment, which may open up new opportunities for many applications. Specifically, we present Wi-Painter, a model-driven system that can accurately detects smooth-surfaced material types and their edges using COTS WiFi devices without modification. Different from previous arts for material identification, Wi-Painter subdivides the target into individual 2D pixels, and simultaneously forms a 2D image based on identifying the material type of each pixel. The key idea of Wi-Painter is to exploit the complex permittivity of the object surface which can be estimated by the different reflectivity of signals with different polarization directions. In particular, we construct the multi-incident angle model to characterize the material, using only the power ratios of the vertically and horizontally polarized signals measured at several different incident angles, which avoids the use of inaccurate WiFi signal phases. We implement and evaluate Wi-Painter in the real world, showing an average classification accuracy of 93.4% for different material types including metal, wood, rubber and plastic of different sizes and thicknesses, and across different environments. In addition, Wi-Painter can accurately detect the material type and edge of the word "LOVE" spliced with different materials, with an average size of 60cm × 80cm, and material edges with different orientations.

Towards Robust Gesture Recognition by Characterizing the Sensing Quality of WiFi Signals

WiFi-based gesture recognition emerges in recent years and attracts extensive attention from researchers. Recognizing gestures via WiFi signal is feasible because a human gesture introduces a time series of variations to the received raw signal. The major challenge for building a ubiquitous gesture recognition system is that the mapping between each gesture and the series of signal variations is not unique, exact the same gesture but performed at different locations or with different orientations towards the transceivers generates entirely different gesture signals (variations). To remove the location dependency, prior work proposes to use gesture-level location-independent features to characterize the gesture instead of directly matching the signal variation pattern. We observe that gesture-level features cannot fully remove the location dependency since the signal qualities inside each gesture are different and also depends on the location. Therefore, we divide the signal time series of each gesture into segments according to their qualities and propose customized signal processing techniques to handle them separately. To realize this goal, we characterize signal's sensing quality by building a mathematical model that links the gesture signal with the ambient noise, from which we further derive a unique metric i.e., error of dynamic phase index (EDP-index) to quantitatively describe the sensing quality of signal segments of each gesture. We then propose a quality-oriented signal processing framework that maximizes the contribution of the high-quality signal segments and minimizes the impact of low-quality signal segments to improve the performance of gesture recognition applications. We develop a prototype on COTS WiFi devices. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our system can recognize gestures with an accuracy of more than 94% on average, and significant improvements compared with state-of-arts.

Door-Monitor: Counting In-and-Out Visitors With COTS WiFi Devices

Visitor counting can be attractive to various applications, like business management and marketing investigation. Recently, many studies have employed wireless signals to achieve visitor counting without people’s active participation and privacy intrusion. However, existing systems mainly count the overall visitors inside a certain area, which fails to provide the fine-grained information of the coming and leaving visitor flow. Unlike previous studies, this article proposes to count the in-and-out visitors to monitor visiting frequency and population, which can be applied for many indoor places, such as shops and restaurants. Therefore, we present the first WiFi-based in-and-out visitor counting system, Door-Monitor, which obtains the direction (enter or exit) and the number of visitors passing by the door. The WiFi signals enable us to count the visitors in a low-cost and nonintrusive way, and it can tell the exact number of visitors even when multiple persons pass by the door simultaneously. To detect the visitors’ passing direction, we show that the patterns in the phase difference series can indicate the entering and exiting passing directions by analyzing the effects of the passing behavior on the signal’s phase information. To count the passing visitors, we perform a short time Fourier transformation on the phase difference series to generate the spectrogram, on which the convolutional neural network is applied for building a counting model. The experimental results show that the average accuracies of passing direction detection and visitor counting are 95.2% and 94.5%, respectively.

Robust and passive motion detection with COTS WiFi devices

Device-free Passive (DfP) detection has received increasing attention for its ability to support various pervasive applications. Instead of relying on variable Received Signal Strength (RSS), most recent studies rely on finer-grained Channel State Information (CSI). However, existing methods have some limitations, in that they are effective only in the Line-Of-Sight (LOS) or for more than one moving individual. In this paper, we analyze the human motion effect on CSI and propose a novel scheme for Robust Passive Motion Detection (R-PMD). Since traditional low-pass filtering has a number of limitations with respect to data denoising, we adopt a novel Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based filtering technique to capture the representative signals of human motion and extract the variance profile as the sensitive metric for human detection. In addition, existing schemes simply aggregate CSI values over all the antennas in MIMO systems. Instead, we investigate the sensing quality of each antenna and aggregate the best combination of antennas to achieve more accurate and robust detection. The R-PMD prototype uses off-the-shelf WiFi devices and the experimental results demonstrate that R-PMD achieves an average detection rate of 96.33% with a false alarm rate of 3.67%.