ReActor: Real-time and Accurate Contactless Gesture Recognition with RFID

Contactless gesture recognition has emerged as a promising technique to enable diverse smart applications, e.g., novel human-machine interaction. Among others, gesture recognition based on radio frequency identification (RFID) is preferred due to its prevalent availability, low cost, and ease in deployment. However, current RFID-based gesture recognition approaches usually use profile template matching to distinguish different gestures, making them suffer from large recognition latency and fail to support real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a real-time and accurate contactless RFID-based gesture recognition approach called ReActor. ReActor uses machine learning rather than time-consuming profile template matching to distinguish different gestures, and thus achieves both very low recognition latency and high recognition accuracy. The major challenge of our approach is to determine a set of suitable attributes that can preserve the profile features of the signals related to different gestures. We combine two types of attributes in ReActor: the statistics of the signal profile that characterize coarse-grained features and the wavelet (transformation) coefficients of the signal profile that characterize fine-grained local features, both of which can be calculated fast. Experimental results demonstrate that ReActor can recognize a gesture with average latency less than 51ms, two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art approaches based on profile template matching. Furthermore, ReActor also achieves higher recognition accuracy than previous works due to its optimized attribute set.