Time Reversal Based Robust Gesture Recognition Using Wifi

Gesture recognition using wireless sensing opened a plethora of applications in the field of human-computer interaction. However, most existing works are not robust without requiring wearables or tedious training/calibration. In this work, we propose WiGRep, a time reversal based gesture recognition approach using Wi-Fi, which can recognize different gestures by counting the number of repeating gesture segments. Built upon the time reversal phenomenon in RF transmission, the Time Reversal Resonating Strength (TRRS) is used to detect repeating patterns in a gesture. A robust low-complexity algorithm is proposed to accommodate possible variations of gestures and indoor environments. The main advantages of WiGRep are that it is calibration-free and location and environment independent. Experiments performed in both line of sight and non-line-of-sight scenarios demonstrate a detection rate of 99.6% and 99.4%, respectively, for a fixed false alarm rate of 5%.