Human Presence Detection (HPD) is key to enable intelligent power management and security features in everyday devices. In this paper we propose the first HPD solution that leverages monostatic Wi-Fi sensing and detects user position using only the built-in Wi-Fi hardware of a device, with no need for external devices, access points, or additional sensors. In contrast, existing HPD solutions for laptops require external dedicated sensors which add cost and complexity, or rely on camera-based approaches that introduce significant privacy concerns. We herewith introduce the Range-Filtered Doppler Spectrum (RF-DS), a novel Wi-Fi sensing technique for presence estimation that enables both range-selective and temporally windowed detection of user presence. By applying targeted range-area filtering in the Channel Impulse Response (CIR) domain before Doppler analysis, our method focuses processing on task-relevant spatial zones, significantly reducing computational complexity. In addition, the use of temporal windows in the spectrum domain provides greater estimator stability compared to conventional 2D Range-Doppler detectors. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive multi-rate processing framework that dynamically adjusts Channel State Information (CSI) sampling rates-operating at low frame rates (10Hz) during idle periods and high rates (100Hz) only when motion is detected. To our knowledge, this is the first low-complexity solution for occupancy detection using monostatic Wi-Fi sensing on a built-in Wi-Fi network interface controller (NIC) of a commercial off-the-shelf laptop that requires no external network infrastructure or specialized sensors. Our solution can scale across different environments and devices without calibration or retraining.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Comparison of Wi-Fi sensing systems.
Fig. 2 : Devices used for the measurements: (a) HP laptop (Wi-Fi 7), (b) Lenovo laptop (Wi-Fi 6E).
Parameter
Symbol
Unit
Idle
Detection
Frame Rate
fframe
Hz
10
100
Number of Frames
M
–
32
32
Bandwidth
B
MHz
160
160
Carrier Frequency
fc
GHz
5.8
5.8
Range Resolution
Δr
m
0.94
0.94
Number of Range Gates
Rg
–
9
9
TABLE I : RF-DS System Parameters for Idle and Detection Modes
Fig. 3 : RF-DS Doppler spectra for a single range (3 m) with user breathing (a) using DC cancellation [ 14 ] (b) proposed MTI filtering. MTI filtering improves self-interference suppression and enhances micro-Doppler visibility of respiration.
Fig. 4 : Range and velocity tracking during the approach–leave cycle. (a) 2D FFT range–Doppler map; (b) RF-DS output. Left axis: Estimated range (blue) vs. ground truth (black); right axis: Doppler velocity (red). RF-DS yields smoother, more robust tracking for user presence applications.
Fig. 5 : Cross-platform HPD results: Presence, absence, approach, and leave state estimation for (a) Lenovo Wi-Fi 6E and (b) HP Wi-Fi 7 laptops. Both platforms demonstrate consistent performance, confirming the HW independence of the proposed approach.
We present LiveSense - a cross-platform that transforms a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi Network Interface Card (NIC) on a laptop into a centimeter-level Range-Doppler sensor while preserving simultaneous communication capability. The laptops are equipped with COTS Intel AX211 (Wi-Fi 6E) or Intel BE201 (Wi-Fi 7) NICs. LiveSense can (i) Extract fully-synchronized channel state information (CSI) at >= 40 Hz, (ii) Perform time-phase alignment and self-interference cancellation on-device, and (iii) Provide a real-time stream of range, Doppler, subcarrier magnitude/phase and annotated video frames to a Python/Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI). The demo will showcase the ability to detect (i) Distance and radial velocity of attendees within a few meters of the device, (ii) Micro-motion (respiration), and (iii) Hand-gesture ranging. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-ever demo to obtain accurate range information of targets from commercial Wi-Fi, despite the limited 160 MHz bandwidth.
Jessica Sanson, Rahul C. Shah, Maximilian Pinaroc +2
∗ Intel Deutschland GmbH, Munich, Germany · † Intel Labs, Santa Clara, CA, USA
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