TENT: Connect Language Models with IoT Sensors for Zero-Shot Activity Recognition

Recent achievements in language models have showcased their extraordinary capabilities in bridging visual information with semantic language understanding. This leads us to a novel question: can language models connect textual semantics with IoT sensory signals to perform recognition tasks, e.g., Human Activity Recognition (HAR)? If so, an intelligent HAR system with human-like cognition can be built, capable of adapting to new environments and unseen categories. This paper explores its feasibility with an innovative approach, IoT-sEnsors-language alignmEnt pre-Training (TENT), which jointly aligns textual embeddings with IoT sensor signals, including camera video, LiDAR, and mmWave. Through the IoT-language contrastive learning, we derive a unified semantic feature space that aligns multi-modal features with language embeddings, so that the IoT data corresponds to specific words that describe the IoT data. To enhance the connection between textual categories and their IoT data, we propose supplementary descriptions and learnable prompts that bring more semantic information into the joint feature space. TENT can not only recognize actions that have been seen but also ``guess'' the unseen action by the closest textual words from the feature space. We demonstrate TENT achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot HAR tasks using different modalities, improving the best vision-language models by over 12%.

Reference-based Motion Blur Removal: Learning to Utilize Sharpness in the Reference Image

Despite the recent advancement in the study of removing motion blur in an image, it is still hard to deal with strong blurs. While there are limits in removing blurs from a single image, it has more potential to use multiple images, e.g., using an additional image as a reference to deblur a blurry image. A typical setting is deburring an image using a nearby sharp image(s) in a video sequence, as in the studies of video deblurring. This paper proposes a better method to use the information present in a reference image. The method does not need a strong assumption on the reference image. We can utilize an alternative shot of the identical scene, just like in video deblurring, or we can even employ a distinct image from another scene. Our method first matches local patches of the target and reference images and then fuses their features to estimate a sharp image. We employ a patch-based feature matching strategy to solve the difficult problem of matching the blurry image with the sharp reference. Our method can be integrated into pre-existing networks designed for single image deblurring. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

RefVSR++: Exploiting Reference Inputs for Reference-based Video Super-resolution

Smartphones equipped with a multi-camera system comprising multiple cameras with different field-of-view (FoVs) are becoming more prevalent. These camera configurations are compatible with reference-based SR and video SR, which can be executed simultaneously while recording video on the device. Thus, combining these two SR methods can improve image quality. Recently, Lee et al. have presented such a method, RefVSR. In this paper, we consider how to optimally utilize the observations obtained, including input low-resolution (LR) video and reference (Ref) video. RefVSR extends conventional video SR quite simply, aggregating the LR and Ref inputs over time in a single bidirectional stream. However, considering the content difference between LR and Ref images due to their FoVs, we can derive the maximum information from the two image sequences by aggregating them independently in the temporal direction. Then, we propose an improved method, RefVSR++, which can aggregate two features in parallel in the temporal direction, one for aggregating the fused LR and Ref inputs and the other for Ref inputs over time. Furthermore, we equip RefVSR++ with enhanced mechanisms to align image features over time, which is the key to the success of video SR. We experimentally show that RefVSR++ outperforms RefVSR by over 1dB in PSNR, achieving the new state-of-the-art.

MM-Fi: Multi-Modal Non-Intrusive 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Wireless Sensing

4D human perception plays an essential role in a myriad of applications, such as home automation and metaverse avatar simulation. However, existing solutions which mainly rely on cameras and wearable devices are either privacy intrusive or inconvenient to use. To address these issues, wireless sensing has emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging LiDAR, mmWave radar, and WiFi signals for device-free human sensing. In this paper, we propose MM-Fi, the first multi-modal non-intrusive 4D human dataset with 27 daily or rehabilitation action categories, to bridge the gap between wireless sensing and high-level human perception tasks. MM-Fi consists of over 320k synchronized frames of five modalities from 40 human subjects. Various annotations are provided to support potential sensing tasks, e.g., human pose estimation and action recognition. Extensive experiments have been conducted to compare the sensing capacity of each or several modalities in terms of multiple tasks. We envision that MM-Fi can contribute to wireless sensing research with respect to action recognition, human pose estimation, multi-modal learning, cross-modal supervision, and interdisciplinary healthcare research.

GaitFi: Robust Device-Free Human Identification via WiFi and Vision Multimodal Learning

As an important biomarker for human identification, human gait can be collected at a distance by passive sensors without subject cooperation, which plays an essential role in crime prevention, security detection and other human identification applications. At present, most research works are based on cameras and computer vision techniques to perform gait recognition. However, vision-based methods are not reliable when confronting poor illuminations, leading to degrading performances. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal gait recognition method, namely GaitFi, which leverages WiFi signals and videos for human identification. In GaitFi, Channel State Information (CSI) that reflects the multi-path propagation of WiFi is collected to capture human gaits, while videos are captured by cameras. To learn robust gait information, we propose a Lightweight Residual Convolution Network (LRCN) as the backbone network, and further propose the two-stream GaitFi by integrating WiFi and vision features for the gait retrieval task. The GaitFi is trained by the triplet loss and classification loss on different levels of features. Extensive experiments are conducted in the real world, which demonstrates that the GaitFi outperforms state-of-the-art gait recognition methods based on single WiFi or camera, achieving 94.2% for human identification tasks of 12 subjects.

MetaFi: Device-Free Pose Estimation via Commodity WiFi for Metaverse Avatar Simulation

Avatar refers to a representative of a physical user in the virtual world that can engage in different activities and interact with other objects in metaverse. Simulating the avatar requires accurate human pose estimation. Though camera-based solutions yield remarkable performance, they encounter the privacy issue and degraded performance caused by varying illumination, especially in smart home. In this paper, we propose a WiFi-based IoT-enabled human pose estimation scheme for metaverse avatar simulation, namely MetaFi. Specifically, a deep neural network is designed with customized convolutional layers and residual blocks to map the channel state information to human pose landmarks. It is enforced to learn the annotations from the accurate computer vision model, thus achieving cross-modal supervision. WiFi is ubiquitous and robust to illumination, making it a feasible solution for avatar applications in smart home. The experiments are conducted in the real world, and the results show that the MetaFi achieves very high performance with a PCK@50 of 95.23%.

Deep Learning and Its Applications to WiFi Human Sensing: A Benchmark and A Tutorial

WiFi sensing has been evolving rapidly in recent years. Empowered by propagation models and deep learning methods, many challenging applications are realized such as WiFi-based human activity recognition and gesture recognition. However, in contrast to deep learning for visual recognition and natural language processing, no sufficiently comprehensive public benchmark exists. In this paper, we highlight the recent progress on deep learning enabled WiFi sensing, and then propose a benchmark, SenseFi, to study the effectiveness of various deep learning models for WiFi sensing. These advanced models are compared in terms of distinct sensing tasks, WiFi platforms, recognition accuracy, model size, computational complexity, feature transferability, and adaptability of unsupervised learning. It is also regarded as a tutorial for deep learning based WiFi sensing, starting from CSI hardware platform to sensing algorithms. The extensive experiments provide us with experiences in deep model design, learning strategy skills and training techniques for real-world applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark with an open-source library for deep learning in WiFi sensing research. The benchmark codes are available at https://github.com/CHENXINYAN-sg/WiFi-CSI-Sensing-Benchmark.

EfficientFi: Towards Large-Scale Lightweight WiFi Sensing via CSI Compression

WiFi technology has been applied to various places due to the increasing requirement of high-speed Internet access. Recently, besides network services, WiFi sensing is appealing in smart homes since it is device-free, cost-effective and privacy-preserving. Though numerous WiFi sensing methods have been developed, most of them only consider single smart home scenario. Without the connection of powerful cloud server and massive users, large-scale WiFi sensing is still difficult. In this paper, we firstly analyze and summarize these obstacles, and propose an efficient large-scale WiFi sensing framework, namely EfficientFi. The EfficientFi works with edge computing at WiFi APs and cloud computing at center servers. It consists of a novel deep neural network that can compress fine-grained WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) at edge, restore CSI at cloud, and perform sensing tasks simultaneously. A quantized auto-encoder and a joint classifier are designed to achieve these goals in an end-to-end fashion. To the best of our knowledge, the EfficientFi is the first IoT-cloud-enabled WiFi sensing framework that significantly reduces communication overhead while realizing sensing tasks accurately. We utilized human activity recognition and identification via WiFi sensing as two case studies, and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the EfficientFi. The results show that it compresses CSI data from 1.368Mb/s to 0.768Kb/s with extremely low error of data reconstruction and achieves over 98% accuracy for human activity recognition.

RobustSense: Defending Adversarial Attack for Secure Device-Free Human Activity Recognition

Deep neural networks have empowered accurate device-free human activity recognition, which has wide applications. Deep models can extract robust features from various sensors and generalize well even in challenging situations such as data-insufficient cases. However, these systems could be vulnerable to input perturbations, i.e. adversarial attacks. We empirically demonstrate that both black-box Gaussian attacks and modern adversarial white-box attacks can render their accuracies to plummet. In this paper, we firstly point out that such phenomenon can bring severe safety hazards to device-free sensing systems, and then propose a novel learning framework, RobustSense, to defend common attacks. RobustSense aims to achieve consistent predictions regardless of whether there exists an attack on its input or not, alleviating the negative effect of distribution perturbation caused by adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly enhance the model robustness of existing deep models, overcoming possible attacks. The results validate that our method works well on wireless human activity recognition and person identification systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to investigate adversarial attacks and further develop a novel defense framework for wireless human activity recognition in mobile computing research.

Shuffle Augmentation of Features from Unlabeled Data for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), a branch of transfer learning where labels for target samples are unavailable, has been widely researched and developed in recent years with the help of adversarially trained models. Although existing UDA algorithms are able to guide neural networks to extract transferable and discriminative features, classifiers are merely trained under the supervision of labeled source data. Given the inevitable discrepancy between source and target domains, the classifiers can hardly be aware of the target classification boundaries. In this paper, Shuffle Augmentation of Features (SAF), a novel UDA framework, is proposed to address the problem by providing the classifier with supervisory signals from target feature representations. SAF learns from the target samples, adaptively distills class-aware target features, and implicitly guides the classifier to find comprehensive class borders. Demonstrated by extensive experiments, the SAF module can be integrated into any existing adversarial UDA models to achieve performance improvements.