PCA-Kalman: device-free indoor human behavior detection with commodity Wi-Fi

Human behavior detection has become increasingly significant in various fields of application. In this paper, we propose a device-free indoor human behavior detection method with channel state information (CSI) and principal component analysis (PCA), respectively, in the line of sight environment, non-line-of-sight environment, and through the wall environment experiments. We divide this method into two parts. It begins with an online phase. A fingerprint database is established by collecting the original data packets of CSI in different time periods and using the characteristics of PCA algorithm to reduce the dimension of the original CSI data. Then, some outlier values are removed by Kalman filter algorithm, and we will get more stable data and fully prepared for the docking experiments. At the same time, the PCA algorithm’s estimation results are corrected according to the detected real-time motion speed to reduce the mismatch target. Then, in the offline phase, the classification of data is collected in the real-time environment by using support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. This method not only reduces the time complexity of the algorithm but also improves the detection rate of the human’s behavior and reduces the error. The processed data are matched with the data in the fingerprint database, and finally, the detection of different behaviors performed by humans in an indoor environment is finally achieved according to the matching results. We experimented repeatedly in three different scenarios, with an average 95% of human behavior detection rate in three different environments. In addition, we compare the method proposed in this paper with the existing methods in different aspects, such as the impact of the number of subcarriers, the impact of data packets, and the impact of the test area. The experimental results show that this method is superior to other algorithms in terms of average error and indoor activity recognition accuracy, which can more accurately identify indoor human motion behavior and improve the stability of the system. © 2018, The Author(s).