Radio Biometrics: Human Recognition Through a Wall

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 12; no. 5; pp. 1141 - 1155
• Main Authors: Qinyi Xu, Yan Chen, BeiBei Wang, Liu, K. J. Ray
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2017
• Subjects: Biology; broadband wireless; Communication system security; Human radio biometrics; IEEE 802.11 Standard; Iris recognition; radio shot; through-the-wall human identification; time-reversal (TR); Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2016.2647224

In this paper, we show the existence of human radio biometrics and present a human identification system that can discriminate individuals even through the walls in a non-line-of-sight condition. Using commodity Wi-Fi devices, the proposed system captures the channel state information (CSI) and extracts human radio biometric information from Wi-Fi signals using the time-reversal (TR) technique. By leveraging the fact that broadband wireless CSI has a significant number of multipaths, which can be altered by human body interferences, the proposed system can recognize individuals in the TR domain without line-of-sight radio. We built a prototype of the TR human identification system using standard Wi-Fi chipsets with 3 × 3 multi-in multi-out (MIMO) transmission. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated and validated through multiple experiments. In general, the TR human identification system achieves an accuracy of 98.78% for identifying about a dozen of individuals using a single transmitter and receiver pair. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of Wi-Fi, the proposed system shows the promise for future low-cost low-complexity reliable human identification applications based on radio biometrics.