Deep transfer learning for gesture recognition with WiFi signals

Different gestures have different action speeds, directions, and trajectories that can cause distinctive effects on the propagation of WiFi signals. In this paper, we present a new approach that uses deep transfer learning techniques to recognize gestures based on the channel state information (CSI) extracted from WiFi signals. Firstly, the CSI streams of gestures are captured and the gesture segments are extracted based on the CSI amplitude changes, and then the WiFi-based gesture recognition problem is innovatively converted to an image classification problem by expressing CSI streams as an image matrix. After that, two deep transfer learning methods are applied to recognize gestures using high-level features extracted by deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and fine-tuned CNN models. We evaluated our method using a collected dataset with 12 gestures in two environments, and the experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art WiFi-based gesture recognition methods. © 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.