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HeadSee: Device-free head gesture recognition with commodity RFID

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Abstract

Research shows that the head posture not only contains important interpersonal information but also is an external manifestation of human psychological activities. Head posture plays an important role in automotive safety, smart home, and other intelligent environments. Rf-based posture recognition method provides a non-contact and privacy protection method to detect and monitor human activities. However, how to separate weak activity state information from reflected signals has been a big challenge for this kind of method. This paper proposes HeadSee, a passive human head gesture sensing system built on a cheap commodity RFID device. Without attaching any device to the human body, HeadSee using ICA extracts the weak reflected RF signals from the human body for gesture sensing. And then HeadSee carefully models the head movement by utilizing the signal’s phase/RSS (received signal strength) changes and successfully quantifies the head gesture with continuous sequences of movement states. Extensive experiments show that even with interfering movements from other body parts, HeadSee can still achieve around 91% recognition accuracy of the head gestures.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant Numbers 61772422, 61972316 and 62061146001, the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi under Grant 2019GY-012, the Science and Technology Innovation Team Support Project of Shaanxi under Grant 2018TD-026, and the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project under Grant 2019KWZ-05.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, Northwest University, Xi’an, 710127, China

    Kai Chen, Fuwei Wang, Miaoyu Li, Baoying Liu, Hao Chen & Feng Chen

  2. Shaanxi International Joint Research Centre for the Battery-Free Internet of Things, Xi’an, 710127, China

    Kai Chen & Baoying Liu

  3. Internet of Things Research Center, Northwest University, Xi’an, 710127, China

    Fuwei Wang

  4. Northwest University-Jingdong Wisdom Cloud Joint Research Center for AI & IoT, Xi’an, China

    Feng Chen

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  1. Kai Chen
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  2. Fuwei Wang
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  3. Miaoyu Li
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  4. Baoying Liu
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  5. Hao Chen
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  6. Feng Chen
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Correspondence to Baoying Liu.

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Chen, K., Wang, F., Li, M. et al. HeadSee: Device-free head gesture recognition with commodity RFID. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 15, 1357–1369 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-021-01126-1

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