SimID: Wi-Fi-Based Few-Shot Cross-Domain User Recognition with Identity Similarity Learning

In recent years, indoor user identification via Wi-Fi signals has emerged as a vibrant research area in smart homes and the Internet of Things, thanks to its privacy preservation, immunity to lighting conditions, and ease of large-scale deployment. Conventional deep-learning classifiers, however, suffer from poor generalization and demand extensive pre-collected data for every new scenario. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SimID, a few-shot Wi-Fi user recognition framework based on identity-similarity learning rather than conventional classification. SimID embeds user-specific signal features into a high-dimensional space, encouraging samples from the same individual to exhibit greater pairwise similarity. Once trained, new users can be recognized simply by comparing their Wi-Fi signal “query” against a small set of stored templates—potentially as few as a single sample—without any additional retraining. This design not only supports few-shot identification of unseen users but also adapts seamlessly to novel movement patterns in unfamiliar environments. On the large-scale XRF55 dataset, SimID achieves average accuracies of 97.53%, 93.37%, 92.38%, and 92.10% in cross-action, cross-person, cross-action-and-person, and cross-person-and-scene few-shot scenarios, respectively. These results demonstrate SimID’s promise for robust, data-efficient indoor identity recognition in smart homes, healthcare, security, and beyond.