# MultiFormer: A Multi-Person Pose Estimation System Based on CSI and Attention Mechanism

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22555/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [MM-Fi: Multi-Modal Non-Intrusive 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Wireless Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10345/) (2023)
- [Person-in-WiFi: Fine-grained Person Perception using WiFi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00276/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking and Error Diagnosis in Multi-Instance Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05388/) (2017)
- [Thin-Slicing Network: A Deep Structured Model for Pose Estimation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10898/) (2017)
- [MetaFi: Device-Free Pose Estimation via Commodity WiFi for Metaverse Avatar Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10414/) (2022)
- [Can WiFi Estimate Person Pose?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00277/) (2019)
- [Structured Feature Learning for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09065/) (2016)
- [From Point to Space: 3D Moving Human Pose Estimation Using Commodity WiFi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14066/) (2020)
- [Towards Cross-Modal Forgery Detection and Localization on Live Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00848/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust and Realistic Human Pose Estimation via WiFi Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09411/) (2025)
- [MDPose: Human Skeletal Motion Reconstruction Using WiFi Micro-Doppler Signatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04212/) (2022)
- [PowerSkel: A Device-Free Framework Using CSI Signal for Human Skeleton Estimation in Power Station](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01913/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human pose estimation based on Channel State Information (CSI) has emerged as a promising approach for non-intrusive and precise human activity monitoring, yet faces challenges including accurate multi-person pose recognition and effective CSI feature learning. This paper presents MultiFormer, a wireless sensing system that accurately estimates human pose through CSI. The proposed system adopts a Transformer based time-frequency dual-token feature extractor with multi-head self-attention. This feature extractor is able to model inter-subcarrier correlations and temporal dependencies of the CSI. The extracted CSI features and the pose probability heatmaps are then fused by Multi-Stage Feature Fusion Network (MSFN) to enforce the anatomical constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on on the public MM-Fi dataset and our self-collected dataset show that the MultiFormer achieves higher accuracy over state-of-the-art approaches, especially for high-mobility keypoints (wrists, elbows) that are particularly difficult for previous methods to accurately estimate.