Robust Person Identification: A WiFi Vision-based Approach

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has become increasingly important as it supports a wide range of security applications. Traditional person Re-ID mainly relies on optical camera-based systems, which incur several limitations due to the changes in the appearance of people, occlusions, and human poses. In this work, we propose a WiFi vision-based system, 3D-ID, for person Re-ID in 3D space. Our system leverages the advances of WiFi and deep learning to help WiFi devices see, identify, and recognize people. In particular, we leverage multiple antennas on next-generation WiFi devices and 2D AoA estimation of the signal reflections to enable WiFi to visualize a person in the physical environment. We then leverage deep learning to digitize the visualization of the person into 3D body representation and extract both the static body shape and dynamic walking patterns for person Re-ID. Our evaluation results under various indoor environments show that the 3D-ID system achieves an overall rank-1 accuracy of 85.3%. Results also show that our system is resistant to various attacks. The proposed 3D-ID is thus very promising as it could augment or complement camera-based systems.