As a significant biometric identification technology, face recognition (FR) is extensively utilized in identity verification and security surveillance systems. Current research predominantly relies on high-definition RGB camera-based methods. However, these methods are susceptible to various factors such as lighting conditions and disguises. This paper proposes a low-cost face recognition solution called Warm- Face based on thermal array sensors. By leveraging the thermal radiation of the face, we overcome the disturbances caused by lighting conditions and disguises, thereby achieving rapid and highly accurate face recognition. However, face recognition based on thermal array sensors still faces two major challenges. Firstly, in complex scenarios, thermal noise interference can lead to the thermal radiation characteristics of the target face becoming indistinguishable from the background. Secondly, due to their large network parameter sizes and high computational complexity, recognition models face challenges in simultaneously achieving low latency and high accuracy. WarmFace extracts facial regions through a semantic segmentation-based approach, effectively reducing the impact of background interference on recognition performance. Additionally, in the recognition model, we utilize a series of linear transformations instead of convolution operations to process the intrinsic features of images, which reduces redundancy in feature maps while preserving the essential information. Extensive real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of WarmFace in various environments, achieving an average recognition accuracy of 98.6%.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) can recognize users based on their clothing, body shape, and other information without the need for clear facial images, and is widely applied in the field of intelligent security. Traditional Re-ID systems mainly rely on high-definition RGB cameras, but the deployment of large-scale high-definition RGB cameras indoors has caused serious privacy and ethical concerns. Recently, wireless-based Re-ID systems (Wi-Fi, RFID, millimeter-wave radar, etc.) have shown promising prospects, but the limited sensing resolution hinders their practical deployment. In this paper, we propose WarmGait, a Re-ID system based on thermal array sensors, which can achieve high-precision Re-ID at low cost and minimize the invasion of user privacy. However, using thermal arrays for Re-ID still faces two major challenges. The first is the low and unclear texture resolution of images caused by low-cost infrared devices. The second is that existing gait recognition methods require maintaining the sequential constraint of gait images, which reduces the flexibility of gait recognition or Re-ID. To address these two challenges, we first designed an edge module inspired by Taylor Finite Difference (TFD) to aggregate image edge information to help improve the resolution of infrared devices. Then, we considered gait as a collection of gait profiles and extracted features from the frame level and collection level for recognition, breaking through the limitations of the number and order of input images. After extensive experimental evaluation, our model can achieve an average recognition accuracy of 87.3% in various scenarios, demonstrating the potential of WarmGait in Re-ID.

Detecting stowaways hidden in various transport vehicles, including cars, trucks, containers, and trailers, is crucial to border security inspection systems. Existing solutions mainly rely on contact-based sensors and manual inspection, which significantly compromise the efficiency of border control operations. Therefore, there is an urgent need for an automated, efficient and fast non-contact vehicle hidden person detection system. In this paper, we propose SiVe, a novel border inspection system that utilizes laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) to detect hidden people in the vehicle. We extract signals associated with human activities (such as breathing, heartbeat, low-frequency body movements, etc.) from complex laser reflection data to detect the presence of hidden people. Specifically, we first employs the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) algorithm to extract and reconstruct signals associated with human activities in complex and noisy environments. Then based on the characteristics of EMD outputs, we design a Time-series Variation Feature extraction Identification network (TVFI-net) model that accurately captures complex time-varying patterns for efficient and reliable detection of hidden people presence. Extensive real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of SiVe in various environments. The system achieves an average presence detection accuracy of 99.93$\%$for sedans and MPVs, 98.37$\%$for light trucks, 98.07$\%$for heavy trucks, and 95.23$\%$for trailers in non-contact detection of hidden people across twelve different vehicle types, under various indoor and outdoor environments.

In recent years, Wi-Fi sensing has attracted much attention due to the widespread deployment of communication devices. Due to advancements in signal processing algorithms, contactless sensing technology based on Wi-Fi signals has now been widely applied. However, the limited bandwidth of Wi-Fi systems constrains the performance of Wi-Fi sensing, posing challenges for accomplishing more fine-grained tasks (distinguishing more gestures or multiple targets, etc.). To address this challenge, in this paper, we design a spectrogram enhancement network for Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) based on the characteristics of Wi-Fi signals to improve the sensing capability of Wi-Fi signals. Specifically, we use a neural network to generate super-resolution spectrograms of CSI to distinguish different time-frequency components in the environment at a finer granularity. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our designed system can achieve finer-grained perception accuracy than the state-of-the-art systems.

With the aging population, there is an increasing demand for rehabilitation services for people with chronic diseases. However, limitations such as medical resources, geographic barriers, and cost make home rehabilitation an option for more patients. Existing wearable devices and vision methods are effective but face problems with portability, cost, and privacy concerns. As for existing wireless sensing methods, they can only extract coarse features for activity recognition. Therefore, we present EchoHealth, which utilizes a smart speaker for rehabilitation exercise detection and assessment. We upgrade the smart speaker into an active sonar system without hardware modification to generate acoustic micro-distance images with motion information. Then, time-domain motion detection and distance-domain feature extraction are utilized to filter out the effects of non-motion time and distance to extract patient motion features for motion recognition. We further assess the patient's rehabilitation exercises from five aspects, based on which EchoHealth provides rehabilitation guidance. Extensive experiments with 15 participants performing 12 rehabilitation motions confirmed that EchoHealth can achieve 97.4% average accuracy in recognition of rehabilitation motion and provide accurate rehabilitation indicators in various environments.

Recent years, point-of-sale (POS) terminals are no longer limited to wired connections, with many relying on Wi-Fi for data transmission. Although Wi-Fi offers the convenience of wireless connectivity, it introduces significant security vulnerabilities. This work presents a non-intrusive method for eavesdropping POS passwords via Wi-Fi sensing, named${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$. Instead of conventional Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) readings, our approach employs Wi-Fi Beamforming Feedback Information (BFI) for an eavesdropping attack. Compared to CSI, which can only be extracted through intruding into the Access Point (AP) or from a limited selection of commercial Wi-Fi cards (e.g., Intel-5300), BFI readings can be more readily obtained from a broad array of commercial Wi-Fi devices. A key technological contribution of${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$is the development of an analysis model for predicting finger motion trajectories. This model is based on the physical relationship between BFI readings and finger motion, thus eliminating the need for extensive labeled training data. Furthermore, we employ Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) to enhance the BFI series, ensuring performance across various scenarios. We implement${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$using everyday commercial Wi-Fi devices and conduct a series of experiments to assess the impact of this attack. Experimental results demonstrate that${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$achieves an accuracy rate 79$\%$in inferring 6-digit POS passwords within the top-100 attempts.

Nowadays, point-of-sale (POS) terminals are no longer limited to wired connections, and many of them rely on Wi-Fi for data transmission. While Wi-Fi provides the convenience of wireless connectivity, it also introduces significant security risks. Previous research has explored Wi-Fi-based eavesdropping methods. However, these methods often rely on limited environmental robustness of Channel State Information (CSI) and require invasive Wi-Fi hardware, making them impractical in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present SThief, a practical Wi-Fi-based eavesdropping attack that leverages beamforming feedback information (BFI) exchanged between POS terminal and access points (APs) to keystroke inference on POS keypads. By capitalizing on the clear-text transmission characteristics of BFI, this attack demonstrates a more flexible and practical nature, surpassing traditional CSI-based methods. BFI is transmitted in the uplink, carrying downlink channel information that allows the AP to adjust beamforming angles. We exploit this channel information to keystroke inference. To enhance the BFI series, we use maximal ratio combining (MRC), ensuring efficiency across various scenarios. Additionally, we employ the Connectionist Temporal Classification method for keystroke inference, providing exceptional generalization and scalability. Extensive testing validates SThief’s effectiveness, achieving an impressive 81% accuracy rate in inferring 6-digit POS passwords within the top-100 attempts.

Real-time indoor crowd counting plays an important role in many applications such as crowd control, resource allocation and advertisement. Current research predominantly relies on camera-based methods. However, computer vision-based solutions raise severe privacy and ethical concerns. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving counting solution called BeamCount based on Wi-Fi sensing. Instead of using conventional Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) readings, we utilize Wi-Fi Beamforming Feedback Information (BFI) for crowd counting estimation. Compared to CSI which can only be extracted from few commodity Wi-Fi cards (e.g., Intel 5300), BFI readings can be obtained from a large range of commodity Wi-Fi devices. We establish a mapping relationship between BFI and headcount and extract headcounts from BFI inputs through a carefully designed adversarial network. Owing to the adversarial network's cross-domain capability, the proposed counting system can achieve high accuracy across different environments, demonstrating its generalization capability. To mitigate the effect of BFI compression on sensing performance, we adopt a novel time series prediction model. Extensive real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of BeamCount in various environments, achieving an average counting accuracy of 93.6%.

Wi-Fi signals contain information about the surrounding propagation environment and have been widely used in various sensing applications such as gesture recognition, respiratory monitoring, and indoor position. Nevertheless, this information can also be easily stolen by eavesdroppers to obtain private information. In this paper, we propose WiShield, a new framework that protects legitimate users using Wi-Fi sensing applications while preventing unauthorized privacy attacks. The implementation of WiShield is based on a simple principle of physically encrypting Wi-Fi channel status information (CSI) to prevent eavesdroppers from inferring sensitive information through stolen CSI. To achieve a balance between encryption strength, sensing accuracy, and communication quality, we design an efficient multi-objective optimization framework that can safely deliver decryption keys to legitimate users and prevent illegal eavesdropping by eavesdroppers. We implemented the WiShield prototype on an SDR platform and conducted extensive experiments to verify its effectiveness in common Wi-Fi sensing applications. We believe that the implementation of WiShield can improve the privacy standards of Wi-Fi sensing applications, and it is also an important step towards making the integration of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC).

Accurate head movement tracking is crucial for virtual reality and Metaverse in ubiquitous human-computer interaction (HCI) applications. Existing works for head tracking with wearable VR kits and wireless signals require expensive devices and heavy algorithmic processing. To resolve this problem, we propose HeadTrack, a low-cost, high-precision head motion tracking system that uses commercially available wireless earphones to capture the user’s head motion in real-time. HeadTrack uses smartphones as ‘sound anchors’ and emits inaudible chirps picked up by the user’s wireless earphones. By measuring the time-of-flight of these signals from the smartphone to each microphone on the earphone, we can deduce the user’s face orientation and distance relative to the smartphone, enabling us to accurately track the user’s head movement. To realize HeadTrack, we use the cross-correlation method to optimize the Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) based acoustic ranging method, which solves the problem of insufficient wireless earphone bandwidth. Moreover, we solve the problems of asynchronous startup time between devices and the existence of sampling frequency offset. We conduct excessive experiments in real scenarios, and the results prove that HeadTrack can continuously track the direction of the user’s head, with an average error under 6.3° in pitch and 4.9° in yaw.

Passenger counting is crucial for many applications such as vehicle scheduling and traffic capacity assessment. However, most of the existing solutions are either high-cost, privacy invasive or not suitable for passengers the vehicle scenarios. In this work, we propose thePa-Count, an effective real-timePassengerCounting system deployed inside the vehicle via using Wi-FiCSI(Channel State Information). Specifically, in Pa-Count, we design a set of combined filters to eliminate environmental interference and enhance CSI quality. In so doing, we can identify the fluctuation of weak CSI caused by passengers’ subtle movement, i.e., the fidgeting, and then obtain the distribution of fidgeting period and silent period. Following that, we describe the subtle movements of passengers via power law with exponential cutoff distribution and establish a counting model based on the queuing theory. A mathematical inference method with a priori probability is devised to calculate the number of real-time passengers through CSI. We evaluate the performance of the Pa-Count by conducting a set of experiments in real-world vehicle scenarios (including private car and subway). Experimental results show that Pa-Count can achieve robust performance with an average accuracy of over 92$\%$.

Continuous identity authentication is critical for privacy protection throughout an entire user login session. In this article, we propose a continuous user authentication mechanism, namely, HandPass, which employs the vibration responses from hand biometrics and is passively activated by natural user-device interaction. Hand vibration responses are embedded in the mechanical vibration of a force-bearing body consisting of one mobile device and one user hand. A built-in accelerometer of the device can capture hand-dependent vibration signals. Considering the concealment of vibration generation and the nonreplicability of hand structure, it is difficult for attackers to counterfeit user identity. Moreover, for ensuring the robustness of authentication performance to tapping behavior interference, we construct a data augmentation module jointly leveraging a signal processing and learning-based pipeline. It can generate enough vibration responses representing hand structure biometrics under various behaviors, thereby making HandPass comprehensively understand vibration response variation. We prototype HandPass on smartphones, and extensive experiments demonstrate that HandPass can achieve satisfactory authentication accuracy.