GaitSense: Towards Ubiquitous Gait-Based Human Identification with Wi-Fi

Gait, the walking manner of a person, has been perceived as a physical and behavioral trait for human identification. Comparedwith cameras andwearable sensors, Wi-Fi-based gait recognition is more attractive because Wi-Fi infrastructure is almost available everywhere and is able to sense passively without the requirement of on-body devices. However, existing Wi-Fi sensing approaches impose strong assumptions of fixed user walking trajectories, sufficient training data, and identification of already known users. In this article, we present GaitSense, a Wi-Fi-based human identification system, to overcome the above unrealistic assumptions. To deal with various walking trajectories and speeds, GaitSense first extracts target specific features that best characterize gait patterns and applies novel normalization algorithms to eliminate gait irrelevant perturbation in signals. On this basis, GaitSense reduces the training efforts in new deployment scenarios by transfer learning and data augmentation techniques. GaitSense also enables a distinct feature of illegal user identification by anomaly detection, making the system readily available for real-world deployment. Our implementation and evaluation with commodity Wi-Fi devices demonstrate a consistent identification accuracy across various deployment scenarios with little training samples, pushing the limit of gait recognition with Wi-Fi signals.

Automated summary

This article presents GaitSense, a Wi-Fi-based human identification system, that overcomes the unrealistic assumptions of existing Wi-Fi sensing approaches and improves the system's applicability in new deployment scenarios through transfer learning and data augmentation techniques.