3D Human Pose Estimation for Free-form Activity Using WiFi Signals

TL;DR

Winect is a WiFi-based system that tracks 3D human poses during free-form activities, overcoming previous limitations to predefined actions, with high accuracy and environment independence.

Contribution

We introduce Winect, a novel WiFi sensing system capable of tracking 3D human poses during arbitrary activities, using signal separation and joint movement modeling.

Findings

Achieves centimeter-level accuracy in various environments.

Works effectively in non-line-of-sight scenarios.

Supports free-form activity tracking without predefined actions.

Abstract

WiFi human sensing has become increasingly attractive in enabling emerging human-computer interaction applications. The corresponding technique has gradually evolved from the classification of multiple activity types to more fine-grained tracking of 3D human poses. However, existing WiFi-based 3D human pose tracking is limited to a set of predefined activities. In this work, we present Winect, a 3D human pose tracking system for free-form activity using commodity WiFi devices. Our system tracks free-form activity by estimating a 3D skeleton pose that consists of a set of joints of the human body. In particular, we combine signal separation and joint movement modeling to achieve free-form activity tracking. Our system first identifies the moving limbs by leveraging the two-dimensional angle of arrival of the signals reflected off the human body and separates the entangled signals for each limb. Then, it tracks each limb and constructs a 3D skeleton of the body by modeling the inherent relationship between the movements of the limb and the corresponding joints. Our evaluation results show that Winect is environment-independent and achieves centimeter-level accuracy for free-form activity tracking under various challenging environments including the none-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios.