A See-through-Wall System for Device-Free Human Motion Sensing Based on Battery-Free RFID

A see-through-wall system can be used in life detection, military fields, elderly people surveillance. and gaming. The existing systems are mainly based on military devices, customized signals or pre-deployed sensors inside the room, which are very expensive and inaccessible for general use. Recently, a low-cost RFID technology has gained a lot of attention in this field. Since phase estimates of a battery-free RFID tag collected by a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID reader are sensitive to external interference, the RFID tag could be regarded as a battery-free sensor that detects reflections off targeted objects. The existing RFID-based system, however, needs to first learn the environment of the empty room beforehand to separate reflections off the tracked target. Besides, it can only track low-speed metal objects with high-positioning accuracy. Since the human body with its complex surface has a weaker ability to reflect radio frequency (RF) signals than metal objects, a battery-free RFID tag can capture only a subset of the reflections off the human body. To address these challenges, a RFID-based human motion sensing technology, called RF-HMS, is presented to track device-free human motion through walls. At first, we construct transfer functions of multipath channel based on phase and RSSI measurements to eliminate device noise and reflections off static objects like walls and furniture without learning the environment of the empty room before. Then a tag planar array is grouped by many battery-free RFID tags to improve the sensing performance. RF-HMS combines reflections from each RFID tag into a reinforced result. On this basis, we extract phase shifts to detect the absence or presence of any moving persons and further derive the reflections off a single moving person to identify his/her forward or backward motion direction. The results show that RF-HMS can effectively detect the absence or presence of moving persons with 100% accuracy and keep a high accuracy of more than 90% to track human motion directions.