Organizations: School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China. · School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China, and also with the Peng Cheng Laboratory (PCL), Shenzhen 518055, China. · Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China. · School of Flexible Electronics (SoFE), State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies (OEMT), Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518107, China.
The advancement of next-generation Wi-Fi technology heavily relies on sensing capabilities, which play a pivotal role in enabling sophisticated applications. In response to the growing demand for large-scale deployments, contemporary Wi-Fi sensing systems strive to achieve high-precision perception while maintaining minimal bandwidth consumption and antenna count requirements. Remarkably, various deep learning-driven perception technologies have demonstrated the ability to surpass conventional resolution limits. However, the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon have not been thoroughly investigated in existing research. We find that under hardware-constrained conditions, the performance gains of deep learning in Wi-Fi sensing primarily originate from two aspects: prior information and temporal correlation, which act as specific forms of side information that reduce the estimation error bound. We construct a deep learning-based Wi-Fi sensing system using only a single transceiver pair and design experiments to validate these gains. The system achieves an average human pose estimation error of 0.2189 m and an average localization error of 0.6124 m, while operating in real time at 42 fps on commodity hardware.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Angle-of-arrival estimation in a typical Wi-Fi sensing system. The angle of arrival is determined from the time difference between the arrivals of the same signal at different antennas.
Fig. 2: A flowchart of an estimation process, where g(Z) is an estimator that relies only on observations, and g∗(Z∣Y) is an estimator when side information Y is known.
Fig. 3: An example of the collected CSI. The area within the red box exhibits clear sinusoidal characteristics.
Fig. 4: Schematic diagram of the deep learning-based real-time Wi-Fi sensing and visualization system.
Fig. 5: Illustration of the network structure, where we incorporate a hyperparameter in the stacked ConvGRU layers to control the maximum processable sequence length. The depth head and 2D pose estimation head work jointly to achieve 3D human pose estimation.
Fig. 6: Illustration of the three classrooms used for data collection, showing the positions of the transmitter and receivers. During data collection, different propagation environments were created within the same classroom by varying the number and spatial distribution of scatterers.
Fig. 7: (a) CDF of the localization error of the proposed system and of the MUSIC baseline under the same single-transceiver-pair setting. The MUSIC curve is plotted after excluding estimates that fall outside the room, which are spurious peaks caused by the antenna spacing of our testbed. (b) CDF of the human pose estimation error of the proposed system.
Joint
Thorax
Right Shoulder
Right Elbow
Right Wrist
Left Shoulder
Left Elbow
Left Wrist
MAE (m)
0.0886
0.1565
0.3678
0.4763
0.1799
0.3517
0.4856
TABLE I: The mean absolute error (MAE) of HPE.
Fig. 8: Training loss curves for CSI‑based human pose estimation and localization with and without image pre‑training.
Fig. 9: Average estimation error and feasible error lower bound range over time. (a) Pose estimation: average errors of HPE_I and HPE_T, and the lower bound of HPE_T. (b) Localization: average errors of HPE_I and HPE_T, and the lower bound of HPE_T.
Fig. 10: The improvement of HPE_T over HPE_I on different timestamps.
Fig. 11: Example of temporal correlation gain, where the blue skeletons represent the ground truth, while the red skeletons indicate the estimation results. It can be observed that the pose estimation results become progressively more accurate over time.
Fig. 12: Real-time sensing and visualization system in operation.
Wireless sensing, traditionally relying on signal processing (SP) techniques, has recently shifted toward data-driven deep learning (DL) to achieve performance breakthroughs. However, existing deep wireless sensing models are typically end-to-end and task-specific, lacking reusability and interpretability. We propose RF-LEGO, a modular co-design framework that transforms interpretable SP algorithms into trainable, physics-grounded DL modules through deep unrolling. By replacing hand-tuned parameters with learnable ones while preserving core processing structures and mathematical operators, RF-LEGO ensures modularity, cascadability, and structure-aligned interpretability. Specifically, we introduce three deep-unrolled modules for critical RF sensing tasks: frequency transform, spatial angle estimation, and signal detection. Extensive experiments using real-world data for Wi-Fi, millimeter-wave, UWB, and 6G sensing demonstrate that RF-LEGO significantly outperforms existing SP and DL baselines, both standalone and when integrated into multiple downstream tasks. RF-LEGO pioneers a novel SP-DL co-design paradigm for wireless sensing via deep unrolling, shedding light on efficient and interpretable deep wireless sensing solutions. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiot-lab/RF-LEGO.
Motivated by the IEEE 802.11bf effort to standardize advanced WLAN sensing, interest in Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) for passive, device-free, and privacy-preserving activity and gesture recognition has grown rapidly. Recent studies have shown that Doppler velocity projections extracted from CSI, which directly reflect human-motion velocity, enable more robust human activity recognition (HAR) and stronger generalization across users and unseen conditions. Nevertheless, reliable generalization under real-world variability remains a major challenge, hindering the adoption of Wi-Fi sensing in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we introduce Doppler Radiance Fields (DoRF), bringing the concept of neural radiance fields (NeRF) from computer vision into Wi-Fi sensing. DoRF models Doppler velocity projections extracted from Wi-Fi CSI as sparse and diverse virtual-camera views of human motion. It then infers a latent 3D motion sequence whose projections along learned effective Doppler directions explain the CSI-derived Doppler observations. The recovered motion is subsequently projected onto an equiangular grid of directions on the unit sphere, producing a spherical representation of the underlying motion. Since DoRF naturally defines the Doppler representation on spheres, we further introduce DoRF++, a spherical-learning design that applies spherical Transformers for activity classification. Experiments on our collected hand-gesture dataset show that DoRF++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art Wi-Fi-based HAR methods in cross-user generalization accuracy, especially for difficult gestures in settings with a single multi-antenna receiver access point (AP).
Navid Hasanzadeh, Shahrokh Valaee
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
WiFi-based human pose estimation (HPE) enables the detection and interpretation of human body positions and movements without the need for wearable devices while preserving individual privacy concerns. Implementing this solution requires enhancing model performance and maintaining efficiency, especially on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces a novel framework, WiLHPE, for lightweight and efficient human pose estimation using WiFi CSI signals. Empowered by a camera-based model during training, WiLHPE processes raw WiFi signals directly to estimate human poses in the testing phase. It employs a novel neural network architecture to dynamically learn convolutional kernels and apply attention mechanisms across channel and frequency spaces. This innovative method diversifies the kernels to improve the recognition capabilities of WiFi signals without adding complexity, ensuring efficiency. Additionally, the Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator algorithm is employed to optimize the critical hyperparameters of the neural network efficiently, minimizing the time required for optimal hyperparameter search compared to heuristic methods. Results from experiments on both the MM-Fi and WiPose datasets highlight the superiority of WiLHPE over state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 85.96% and 94.27% at PCK50, respectively, with minimal computational overhead. Notably, WiLHPE performs impressively even under challenging conditions, maintaining around 80% at PCK50 under AWGN noise with an error variance of 0.5.
Toan D. Gian, Van-Dinh Nguyen, Vo Phi Son +5
Smart Green Transformation Center (GREEN-X), VinUniversity, Vietnam · Trinity College Dublin, Ireland · University of Oulu, Finland +3