A Climate Adaptation Device-Free Sensing Approach for Target Recognition in Foliage Environments

Accurate and efficient foliage penetration (FOPEN) target recognition plays a vital role in many mission-critical applications, ranging from civilian to surveillance and military. Recently, device-free sensing (DFS), as an emerging technique, has gained great popularity because it requires no dedicated equipment other than wireless transceivers. Although some DFS-based approaches have been successfully applied in foliage environments, they are vulnerable to climate dynamics and heavily rely on relabeling large amounts of new data when the weather is altered. To address this issue, a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based weather adaptive target recognition network (WATRNet) is proposed in this article. Specifically, a lightweight weather conditional normalization (WCN) module is embedded atop each convolutional block to encode inputs under different weather conditions into a shared latent feature space. Under an end-to-end learning manner, the proposed WATRNet first learns knowledge from sufficient labeled data under a certain weather condition to achieve a precise classifier. When applying this model under another weather condition, only the WCN module needs to be retrained using limited new labeled samples to learn weather-invariant features, while the rest convolutional parameters in WATRNet are frozen. Consequently, the domain discrepancy caused by climate variations can be adaptively mitigated with as few relabeled data as possible. Comprehensive evaluations are carried out on a real FOPEN dataset collected under four different weather conditions. Experimental results verify that the presented method can achieve over 90% accuracy, even when it implements from a normal weather condition to another severe weather condition with only small amounts of training samples.