arXiv:2601.02177cs.CVcs.CR2026-01

用廉价WiFi传感器研究多人步态识别,发现硬件限制比算法更重要。

Why Commodity WiFi Sensors Fail at Multi-Person Gait Identification: A Systematic Analysis Using ESP32

  • 用六种信号分离方法在ESP32上测试1-10人场景
  • 最高准确率56%,特征重叠率达97%-99%
  • 硬件传感质量是主要瓶颈,不适合多用户生物识别

WiFi信道状态信息(CSI)在单人步态识别中表现良好,激发了其在无接触生物识别、持续认证和被动识别中的应用兴趣。然而,低成本商品设备实现多人识别的可行性仍不明确。核心问题是:性能差是算法局限,还是商品WiFi硬件的根本感知上限?我们通过基于商品ESP32 WiFi传感器的系统性实证研究回答此问题。评估了六种信号分离方法——FastICA、SOBI、PCA-ICA、NMF、Wavelet和张量分解——在涵盖1-10人的七种场景下的表现,包括受控与真实室内环境。为超越分类准确率,引入三个诊断指标:个体内变异度(ISV)、个体间可区分度(ISD)和性能退化率(PDR)。所有方法性能均有限(39%-56%准确率),算法选择无法显著改善结果。最佳方法NMF达到56%准确率,但所有方法均表现出极高的特征空间重叠(97%-99%)、不稳定的个体内部表征及显著的环境敏感性。结果表明,在商品ESP32 CSI约束下,密集多人步态识别受限于感知质量和空间多样性,而非分离算法。研究对安全与隐私有直接影响:质疑了商品WiFi CSI作为稳健多用户生物识别原语的实用性,同时为低成本现成WiFi硬件的被动识别能力设定了重要边界。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has shown promise for single-person gait identification, raising interest in its use for contactless biometrics, continuous authentication, and passive identification. However, the feasibility of multi-person identification on low-cost commodity devices remains unclear. A critical question is whether weak multi-person performance is primarily an algorithmic limitation, or whether it reflects a more fundamental sensing ceiling on commodity WiFi hardware. We address this question through a systematic empirical study using commodity ESP32 WiFi sensors. We evaluated six different signal separation methods--FastICA, SOBI, PCA-ICA, NMF, Wavelet, and Tensor decomposition--across seven scenarios spanning 1-10 people in both controlled and realistic indoor environments. To investigate beyond classification accuracy, we introduce three diagnostic metrics: intra-subject variability (ISV), inter-subject distinguishability (ISD), and performance degradation rate (PDR). In all methods, performance remains moderate (39%-56% accuracy), with limited evidence that algorithmic choice alone solves the problem. The best-performing method, NMF, reaches 56% accuracy, while all methods exhibit extremely high feature-space overlap (97%-99%), unstable within-subject representations, and marked environmental sensitivity. These findings suggest that, under commodity ESP32 CSI constraints, dense multi-person gait identification is limited more by sensing quality and spatial diversity than by the chosen separation algorithm. Our results have direct implications for security and privacy: they call into question the practicality of commodity WiFi CSI as a robust multi-user biometric primitive for authentication, while also placing important bounds on the passive identification capabilities achievable with low-cost off-the-shelf WiFi hardware.

WiFi感知步态识别生物识别硬件限制

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