Leveraging Topic Model for CSI Based Human Activity Recognition

Activity recognition plays an important role in human-computer interactions. Recently, Channel State Information (CSI), known as a fine-grained information capturing the properties of WiFi signal propagation, has been widely used for activity recognition in a device-free pattern. Since CSI is much sensitive to ambient changes, CSI can be used as fingerprints as human activities. However, existing approaches require tremendous overhead in the model training and suffer from failures due to environmental interferences. In this paper, we propose HAR, a CSI based human activity recognition system. HAR investigates the CSI intra-correlation structure (termed as topics) of different human activities. We leverage an unsupervised machine learning method, namely topic model, to extract action characters. Compared to prior works, HAR only requests minor manual intervention, significantly reducing manpower costs in the model training. We implement HAR using commodity WiFi devices to evaluate its performance under different environment settings. The results show that the extracted features are stable to different devices and volunteers, facilitating HAR to achieving an average matching accuracy, i.e., > 90%.