This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JSAC.2017.2679578, IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017
R-TTWD: Robust Device-free Through-The-Wall
Detection of Moving Human with WiFi
Hai Zhu, Fu Xiao, Lijuan Sun, Ruchuan Wang, and Panlong Yang
AbstractDue to rapid developments of smart devices and
mobile applications, there is an urgent need for a new human-
in-the-loop architecture with better system efficiency and user
experience. Compared with conventional device-based human-
computer interactive (HCI) methods, device-free technology with
WiFi provides a new HCI method and is promising for providing
better user-perceived quality-of-experience. Being essential for
device-free applications, device-free human detection has gained
increasing interest, of which through-the-wall (TTW) human
detection is of great challenge. Existing TTW detection systems
either rely on massive deployment of transceivers or require
specialized WiFi monitors, making them inapplicable for real-
world applications. Recently, more and more researchers have
tapped into the physical layer for more robust and reliable
human detection, ever since Channel State Information (CSI) can
be exported with commodity devices. Despite of great progress
achieved, there have been few works studying TTW detection.
In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for Robust device-
free Through-The-Wall Detection of moving human (R-TTWD)
with commodity devices. Different from the time dimension-
based features exploited in previous works, R-TTWD takes
advantage of the correlated changes over different subcarriers
and extracts first-order difference of eigenvector of CSI across
different subcarriers for TTW human detection. Instead of
direct feature extraction, we first perform a PCA-based filtering
on the preprocessed data since a simple low-pass filtering is
insufficient for noise removal. Furthermore, the detection results
across different transmit-receive antenna pairs are fused with
a majority-vote based scheme for more robust and accurate
detection. We prototype R-TTWD on commodity WiFi devices
and evaluate its performance both in different environments and
over long test period, validating the robustness of R-TTWD with
both detection rates for moving human and human absence
over 99% regardless of different wall materials, dynamic moving
speeds, etc.
Index TermsDevice-free, Through-the-wall, Human detec-
tion, WiFi, Channel State Information (CSI)
I. I NTRODUCTION
Manuscript received September 22, 2016; revised December 24, 2016;
accepted January 26, 2017. Date of publication XX xx, 2017. This work is sup-
ported by National Science Foundation of China under grants No. 61373137,
61572261, 61572260, 61373017; Major Program of Jiangsu Higher Education
Institutions under grants No.14KJA520002 and Graduate Student Research
Innovation Project under grants No. KYLX16_0666, KYLX16_0670. (Corre-
sponding author: Fu Xiao.)
H. Zhu is with the College of Computer, Nanjing University of Posts and
Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China. (e-mail: njuptzhuh@163.com).
F. Xiao, L. Sun and R. Wang are with the Jiangsu High Technolo-
gy Research Key Laboratory for Wireless Sensor Networks, Key Lab of
Broadband Wireless Communication and Sensor Network Technology of
Ministry of Education and College of Computer, Nanjing University of
Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China. (e-mail: {xiaof
,sunlj,wangrc}@njupt.edu.cn).
P. Yang is with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Uni-
versity of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China. (e-mail:
panlongyang@gmail.com).
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1
UE to rapid developments of smart devices and mobile
D applications, innovative technologies and products have
been developed to enhance user experience, such as smart
home and user behavior prediction, building intelligence into
our daily systems [1]. Catalyzed by the prevailing system
intelligence in mobile networks, human users interact with
the systems more intensively and the user-perceived quality-
of-experience (QoE) becomes critical to the performance
of mobile networks, for which understanding user behavior
features serves as a key component [2]. Hence, in order to
design a new human-in-the-loop system, innovative methods
for human-computer interactive should be developed, so as to
improve system performance and provide better users QoE.
There have been a lot of systems for human to interact with
computer interfaces, such as the Xbox Kinect and wearable
sensor networks, however, these solutions primarily rely on
dedicated sensors that are worn by users or cameras and other
special sensors that are installed in the environment, which
are fairly unprofitable for large deployments or useless under
some conditions, and may be inconvenient for elderly people.
Different from conventional device-based schemes, recent de-
velopment in wireless techniques have spurred an emerging
development of device-free sensing techniques, which utilize
pervasive WiFi signals to sense human state without attaching
any device to users, including indoor localization [3], gesture
recognition [4], activity recognition [5], motion tracing [6], etc.
Since device-free technique does not require the users to wear
any devices or even actively participate in the sensing process,
it provides a new way for users to interact with computer
interfaces and is promising for providing better users QoE.
Since an indispensable prerequisite of device-free applica-
tions is to first identify the presence of humans before ex-
tracting higher-level information, device-free human detection
has gained increasing interest recently. Device-free human
detection aims to detect whether there are any people in the
area of interests without attaching any device to them [7], of
which through-the-wall (TTW) detection is of great challenge
due to the severe signal attenuation caused by the wall.
Existing TTW detection systems either rely on dense-deployed
of transceivers [8] [9] or require dedicated devices for signal
transmission [4] [6] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14], making them
inapplicable for commodity devices in real-world applications.
Ever since Channel State Information (CSI), which depicts
the subcarrier-level channel information at the physical layer,
becomes available with commodity devices [15] [16] [17],
more and more researchers have resorted to the physical layer
for more robust and reliable human detection [18] [19] [20].
Although these pioneer works have achieved great progress,
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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
2 IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017
there have been few works studying the more challenging
TTW human detection with commodity devices. More specif-
ically, based on our experiments, existing CSI-based device-
free human detection systems, such as PADS [19] and De-
Man [20], suffer from great performance degradation in TTW
scenario.
In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for Robust
device-free Through-The-Wall Detection of moving human
(R-TTWD) with commodity WiFi devices. Existing wireless-
based device-free human detection schemes basically lever-
age the time dimension information of wireless signal, such
as the signal probability distribution, variance or even the
more robust time-correlation based features. However, in our
experiments, we observe these schemes suffer from great
performance degradation in TTW scenarios due to environ-
ment changes, signal power changes, etc. Thus, in order to
obtain a robust feature for TTW detection, different from the
time dimension-based features in previous works, we exploit
the insufficiently explored subcarrier dimension information
of CSI, which has mainly been simply used to increase
the reliability via frequency diversity before [20] [21] [22].
Specifically, we investigate the correlated changes among
different subcarriers in the presence of human movement and
extract the mean of first-order difference of eigenvector of
CSI across different subcarriers, which varies smoothly over
neighboring subcarriers. Next, we apply the Support Vector
Machine (SVM) [23] algorithm to search for a separation
line of the extracted features to identify different states, i.e.,
moving human presence and absence. To achieve this, we first
pass the raw CSI measurements through an outlier identifier to
sift out biased observations. Then, to account for the sampling
jitter during CSI collection, we utilize linear interpolation to
obtain evenly spaced CSI in the time domain. Afterwards,
a wavelet filter is applied to eliminate the high-frequency
electromagnetic noise. In our experiments, we observe that
although a low-pass filter can remove the surrounding high-
frequency noise, it cannot efficiently remove the impulse and
burst noises caused by internal state transitions in sender and
receiver WiFi network interface cards (NICs), such as trans-
mission rate adaptation and transmission power changes. Thus,
before performing feature extraction, we design a principal
component analysis (PCA) [24] based filtering component to
further sanitize the CSI while retaining enough information
for human detection. Moreover, to improve the robustness
and reliability of R-TTWD, we develop a majority-vote based
algorithm to fuse the detection results of every transmit-receive
(TX-RX) antenna pair.
To validate our design, we prototype R-TTWD on com-
modity WiFi devices and evaluate its performance in two im-
portant environments, including a meeting room and an office
room. We collect CSI in different time periods of different
days in each environment, taking into account both different
moving speeds and weather conditions. Our experiment results
demonstrate that R-TTWD achieves both a true positive rate
for moving human and a true negative rate for human-free
scenario over 99% on average. Besides, we demonstrate R-
TTWDs applicability across different environments without
requiring an environment-tailored threshold calibration.
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In summary, our main contributions are as follows.
We propose a design for robust device-free through-the-
wall human detection (R-TTWD) using commodity WiFi
devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
scheme that leverages CSI of commodity devices for
robust device-free TTW human detection.
Different from utilizing the correlation of CSI in the
time dimension in previous works, we investigate the
insufficiently explored subcarrier dimension information
of CSI and extract a subcarrier dimension-based feature
for TTW human detection using the first-order difference
of the eigenvectors derived from the PCA of CSI across d-
ifferent subcarriers. The feature holds excellent sensitivity
and robustness for device-free TTW human detection, and
can enable numerous finer-grained sensing applications in
addition to human detection.
We leverage the space diversity provided by multi-
antennas supported by modern MIMO systems and
present a majority-vote based algorithm to enable more
accurate and robust detection.
We prototype R-TTWD on commodity WiFi devices and
validate its performance in two important indoor environ-
ments. Experiment results demonstrate that regardless of
different environments, R-TTWD can achieve both true
positive rate for moving human and true negative rate for
human-free scenario over 99% on average, outperforming
existing device-free human detection schemes. Moreover,
we test R-TTWD with data fifty days after the training,
demonstrating R-TTWDs robustness over long testing
period without requiring recalibration, a feature which
has not been explored in previous works.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We review the
related work in Section II, followed by some preliminaries in
Section III. Section IV presents an overview of the system
architecture, while the detailed design of each component
is provided in Section V. In Section VI, we present the
experiment settings and performance evaluation. We discuss
the limitations and future works in VII and conclude our work
in Section VIII.
II. R ELATED W ORKS
The design of R-TTWD is closely related to the following
categories of research.
Device-free human detection using WiFi. With the pop-
ularity of wireless networks, device-free or passive detection
has drawn much attention in the past years [7]. Received signal
strength (RSS) has been widely used for device-free detection
due to its handy accessibility with commodity devices. The
primary underpinning is that RSS will undergo observable
changes due to human presence and movements. Youssef et
al. [7] discuss the challenges of device-free passive techniques
and propose both moving average and moving variance based
feature extraction algorithms for motion detection. Yang et
al. [25] propose a joint intrusion learning approach, which
has the ability in combining the detection power of sever-
al complementary intrusion indicators and detects different
intrusion patterns at the same time. RASID [26] improves
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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
ZHU et al.: R-TTWD: ROBUST DEVICE-FREE THROUGH-THE-WALL DETECTION OF MOVING HUMAN WITH WIFI
the detection accuracy by analyzing RSS features and adopt-
ing a nonparametric technique for adapting to environmental
changes. Another well-known RSS-based system is the Radio
Tomographic Imaging (RTI) [9], which deploys a sensor
network around the target area and embraces the redundancy
introduced by the dense-deployed sensors to visualize the
human induced RSS attenuations. Unfortunately, in indoor
environment, the most facile RSS is neither accurate nor
consistent due to the highly dynamic and complex environ-
ment [27]. To overcome RSSs high variability, some pioneer
works have resorted to CSI for better detection performance
since channel response can be partially extracted from off-the-
shelf receivers in the format of CSI [15]. FIMD [18] leverages
eigenvalues of correlation matrix of successive measurements
to enable accurate fine-grained motion detection. Pilot [28] is
an early attempt in device-free positioning, which exploits the
correlation of CSI over time to monitor abnormal appearance
and further locate the target. PADS [19] and DeMan [20]
further exploit full information of CSI, i.e., amplitude and
phase, to enhance detection performance. WiFall [21] proposes
a local outlier factor based anomaly detection algorithm to
detect the anomaly change in wireless signal. E-eyes [29]
leverages the moving average and probability distribution of
CSI measurements to identify the presence of an activity or
not. Different from previous works exploiting the temporal
stability of CSI during human absence, R-TTWD leverages
the correlated effect human movement impose on different
subcarriers, which is demonstrated to be more sensitive and
robust. A more recent work, mTrack [30], has strived to use the
highly-directional 60 GHz millimeter wave radios for passive
object sensing, i.e., track the trajectory of a writing object
at high precision. Zhu et al. [31] propose to reuse 60 GHz
radios for mobile radar imaging, which can not only image an
object, but also discover a rich set of object surface properties
including object surface orientation and material. Although 60
GHz radios are standardized in IEEE 802.11 ad and anticipated
to penetrate one third of wireless links by 2018, they cannot
penetrate walls or other objects, being impracticable for TTW
detection. Apart from the above works, researchers have
proposed to sense finer-grained human activity with WiFi,
such as human respiration [32] and finger gesture [33]. Albeit
promising, these applications have limited working range, e.g.,
50cm or 1m LOS distance between TX and RX, or require
extremely high transmission rate, e.g., 2000 packets/s, which
will interrupt normal wireless communication.
Through-the-wall sensing using WiFi. R-TTWD is mo-
tivated by recent researches that use WiFi to detect users
through walls [4] [6] [8] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]. VRTI [8]
tracks human movement through walls by deploying dozens of
transceivers throughout or on many sides of a room in a res-
idential home while R-TTWD only requires a single wireless
link. WiSee [4] leverages Doppler shifts of wireless signals
to enable whole-home sensing and recognition of human
gestures. Wi-Vi [10] initializes through-wall motion imaging
using MIMO nulling. WiTrack [11] implements a Frequency
Modulated Carrier Wave (FMCW)-based 3D motion tracking
system at the granularity of 10cm. WiTrack2.0 [12] further
realizes multi-person localization based on the reflections of
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3
wireless signals off human bodies using USRP software radios
and an analog FMCW radio. WiDeo [6] mines the backscatter
reflections from the environment and can accurately recon-
struct the detailed trajectory of a users free-form writing
or gesturing in the air other than the coarsely defined full
body motion. While promising, these systems all have been
prototyped with specialized devices, e.g., USRP software ra-
dios, while R-TTWD is implemented with commodity devices.
Besides, R-TTWD exploits the already deployment of WiFi
access point (AP) within many buildings to perform TTW
detection, while Wi-Vi and WiTrack use a specialized device
for transmitting and receiving signals simultaneously, forcing
them to perform a costly nulling procedure to counteract
the flash effect. The closest works are [13] and [14] which
also exploit WiFi AP inside a building for passive TTW
monitoring. However, the receiver in [13] is a specialized
radar receiver with a PC for intensive offline processing
and the scheme in [14] can only detect line of sight (LOS)
crossing between the transmitter and receiver. In comparison,
R-TTWD requires little processing, being suitable for real time
monitoring with standard hardware, and can accurately detect
human presence not only on the direct LOS path, but also on
the reflected paths with a single wireless link.
III. P RELIMINARIES
A. Channel State Information (CSI)
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is
a bandwidth-efficient digital multicarrier modulation scheme,
which has been widely adopted in many modern wireless
communication systems, such as IEEE 802.11 a/g/n/ac and
LTE cellular network. In OFDM, signals are transmitted over
many orthogonal frequencies called subcarriers. Based on
OFDM, CSI describes how a signal propagates from the
transmitter to the receiver at the subcarrier level, revealing
the combined effect of, for instance, reflecting, scattering and
power decay with distance. With slight driver modification on
off-the-shelf NIC, e.g., Intel 5300, CSI can be exported to the
upper users on N=30 subcarriers [15]:
H = [H ( f 1 ), H ( f 2 ), . . . , H ( f i )], i [1, N] (1)
where H ( f i ) is the CSI at subcarrier i with central frequency
f i . Each CSI H ( f i ) depicts the amplitude and phase of OFDM
subcarrier i:
H ( f i ) = |H ( f i )|e j H ( fi ) (2)
Here |H ( f i )| and H ( f i ) represent the amplitude and phase,
respectively.
Currently, there are mainly two tools available for CSI
extraction, i.e., Intel CSI Tool [15] and Atheros CSI Tool [16].
Although Atheros CSI Tool can be implemented with a series
of Atheros 802.11n WiFi chipsets, such as Atheros 9580
NIC [34], it requires two computers with customized Linux
Kernel 4.1.10 installed. Since we only adopt commodity
router, e.g., TL-WR742N, we adopt the Intel CSI tool for our
system implementation.
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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

4 IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017

30
Subcarrier 1
4
Raw phase
Channel State Information
Subcarrier 10 3 Transformed phase
25
Subcarrier 20
amplitude [dbm]

2
Subcarrier 30
20
1

phase
15 0
Data preprocessing

10
1
Outlier Data Noise
2
removal interpolation filtering
5
3

0 4
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
time [s] time [s]

(a) Amplitude at subcarrier 1, 10, 20 (b) Raw phase and its calibrated Human detection
and 30 version at subcarrier 10
PCA-based filtering Feature extration
Fig. 1: CSI of a single stream for 2 seconds in the human-free
scenario. (a) Amplitude at subcarrier 1, 10, 20 and 30. (b)
Raw phase and its calibrated version at subcarrier 10. N
Multi-antenna
enhancement

B. Multiple Input and Multiply Output (MIMO)

Human presence?
The use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiv-
Y
er has revolutionized wireless communication over the past
decade and MIMO technique based on them is the key feature Alarm!
of 802.11n equipment that sets it apart from earlier 802.11a/g
equipment [35]. MIMO uses multiple antennas to increase the Fig. 2: System architecture of R-TTWD
reliability via spatial diversity and improve the data throughput
20
via spatial multiplexing without enhancing the bandwidth Raw CSI
Outliers
and transmission power. Since there are multiple antennas in
amplitude [dbm]

MIMO, each combination of transmitter and receiver antenna
can be considered as a separate TX-RX data stream. Suppose
there are m transmit antennas and n receive antennas, the CSI
of all TX-RX data streams can be expressed as:
H11 H12
H21 H22
H = .
.. ..
.. . .
Hm1 Hm2
where Hmn is a vector describing the CSI of all subcarriers
between the m-th transmit antenna to the n-th receive antenna
as in equation (1). Fig. 1 plots the CSI of a single TX-
RX stream for 2 seconds in the human-free scenario. As
shown in the figure, the amplitude maintains good stability
with some noises while the raw phase performs quite random
due to random noise and the lack of time and frequency
synchronization. Specifically, the measured phase at subcarrier
k with carrier frequency wk can be expressed as:
k = k + 2wk t + 2wt + k
where k is the genuine phase, 2wk t and 2wt are the
unknown phase shifts caused by the sampling time offset and
sampling frequency offset, and k is some measurement noise.
To mitigate the random noise in raw phase measurements, we
can perform a linear transformation as recommended in [36]
and obtain the calibrated phase as k = k wk , where
and are the slope and offset of phase change over all the
subcarriers, respectively. However, although we can mitigate
the randomness to a large extent as illustrated in Fig. 1b,
Intel 5300 NIC is known to have a firmware issue on the
2.4GHz bands and is only able to get reliable phase reading
at 5GHz [37] [38]. Since we employ the Intel 5300 NIC at
2.4GHz for our experiments, we focus on the CSI amplitude in
15
10
5
H1n
H2n
0
0 1 2 3 4 5
.. (3) time [s]
.
Hmn Fig. 3: Outlier identification for CSI at subcarrier 15 in the
human-free scenario.
this paper and leave further exploration into the 5GHz channel
to obtain both usable amplitude and phase with Intel 5300 for
our future work.
IV. OVERVIEW
In this section, we present the overall architecture of R-
TTWD as shown in Fig. 2. R-TTWD initializes by collecting
(4) CSI with commodity off-the-shelf NIC, i.e., Intel 5300. Since
the raw CSI measurements could contain biased observations
and noise, we first pass them through a data preprocessing
module, including a Hampel identifier [39] for outlier removal,
data linear interpolation and a wavelet-based noise filtering.
Although the noise filtering component can remove most of
the high frequency noises, through our experiments we observe
that there are still some noises remained in the filtered CSI,
which are mainly determined by the internal state changes in
WiFi devices. To further sanitize the CSI, we apply a PCA-
based filtering scheme while retaining enough information for
human detection. Afterwards, based on the correlation among
different subcarriers, we propose to extract the respective
mean of first-order difference of the remaining eigenvectors
as the robust feature for TTW human detection. The extracted

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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

ZHU et al.: R-TTWD: ROBUST DEVICE-FREE THROUGH-THE-WALL DETECTION OF MOVING HUMAN WITH WIFI 5

20 20 20
Subcarrier 1 Subcarrier 1 Subcarrier 1
Subcarrier 15 Subcarrier 15 Subcarrier 15
Subcarrier 30 Subcarrier 30 Subcarrier 30
amplitude [dbm]

amplitude [dbm]

amplitude [dbm]
15 15 15

10 10 10

5 5 5

0 0 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5
time [s] time [s] time [s]
(a) The original CSI (b) The CSI after outlier removal (c) The CSI after linear interpolation

Fig. 4: Outlier removal and data interpolation on subcarrier 1,15,30 for CSI in the human-free scenario. (a) The original
CSI of subcarrier 1,15,30. (b) The CSI after outlier removal with Hampel identifier. (c) The evenly spaced CSI after linear
interpolation.

features are then fed to a classical SVM classification model

18 18
to search for a separation line between human presence and 16
Subcarrier 1
Subcarrier 15 16
Subcarrier 1
Subcarrier 15
Subcarrier 30 Subcarrier 30
absence. Finally, for the multiple antennas in modern MIMO,
amplitude [dbm]

amplitude [dbm]
14 14

12 12
we develop a majority-vote based algorithm that fuses the 10 10
detection results of every TX-RX antenna pair and determines 8 8

whether to release an alarm. 6 6

4 4

2 2
V. M ETHODOLOGY 0 1 2
time [s]
3 4 5 0 1 2
time [s]
3 4 5

In this section, we elaborate the design of R-TTWD by real
measurements.
A. Data preprocessing
1) Outlier removal: The first step to process CSI is to
remove outliers. During our experiments, we observe that there
exist some anomalous measurements which are obviously not
caused by human movement and should be eliminated before
human detection. Fig. 3 illustrates the outliers contained in
the raw CSI collected in the human-free scenario. To identify
and remove these outliers, we adopt a Hampel identifier [39],
which declares any point falling out of the closed interval
[ , + ] as an outlier, where and are
the median and the median absolute deviation (MAD) of the
data sequence, respectively. is application dependent and
the most widely used value is 3. We therefore apply Hampel
identifier on all 30 subcarriers. Fig. 4a and 4b show the CSI
of 3 subcarriers before and after performing outlier removal.
It can be seen that there are some significant abrupt changes
around 1s, 2s, 3s, 3.5s and 4.5s, which have been effectively
removed by the Hampel filter, and other subcarriers also show
similar behavior.
2) Data interpolation: It should be noted that although we
have set the transmitter to transmit 50 packets per second in
our experiments, we cannot guarantee the sampling rate of CSI
with the same frequency. In fact, we find that sampling jitter
is quite common in CSI, resulting from packet loss and some
other reasons. Therefore, to account for the CSI information
loss caused by sampling jitter and outlier removal, the CSI
measurements must be interpolated. Specifically, we utilize the
1-D linear interpolation algorithm to ensure evenly spaced CSI
with 20ms apart between consecutive measurements. Fig. 4c
portrays the evenly distributed CSI after linear interpolation.
(a) The CSI before wavelet denois- (b) The CSI after wavelet denoising
ing
Fig. 5: Wavelet denoising on subcarrier 1,15,30 for CSI with
human presence. (a) The CSI on subcarrier 1,15,30 after linear
interpolation. (b) The CSI after wavelet denoising.
3) Noise filtering: The collected CSI samples are noisy
because commercial WiFi devices are susceptible to complex
indoor environment, such as surrounding electromagnetic in-
terference, air pressure and temperature changes. As the varia-
tions caused by human activities usually have a low frequency
range, we adopt a low-pass filter to eliminate noise lying at the
high end of the spectrum. We argue that it is not appropriate to
use conventional filter, such as Butterworth filter [40], since
the pass band for the low-pass filter usually need to be less than
one-twentieth of the sampling rate so that the energy of the
residual noise in the pass band becomes negligible compared
to the signal energy [41] while our sampling rate is just 50
samples per second. As a result, we perform a wavelet-based
denoising scheme [42] to remove random noise and smooth
the CSI data.
Wavelet denoising consists of three stages: decomposition,
thresholding detail coefficients and reconstruction. During the
decomposition procedure, discrete wavelet transform recur-
sively splits the signal into two parts, high-frequency coef-
ficients (details) and low-frequency coefficients (approxima-
tions), at different frequency levels. After that, the thresholding
is applied to the detail coefficients to remove the noisy part.
Finally, we reconstruct the denoised signal by combining the
approximation coefficient of the last level with the thresholded
details. To be more specific, we apply a 2-level db4 wavelet
transform on CSI data of all 30 subcarriers and determine

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1
Max eigenvalue of phase
22 22
Subcarrier 1 Subcarrier 1
0.95 20 20
Subcarrier 5 Subcarrier 5
18 Subcarrier 10 18 Subcarrier 10

amplitude [dbm]

amplitude [dbm]
16 Subcarrier 15 16 Subcarrier 15
0.9
Subcarrier 20 Subcarrier 20
14 14
Subcarrier 25 Subcarrier 25
12 Subcarrier 30 12 Subcarrier 30
0.85
10 10
8 8
0.8 6 6
4 4
0.75 No movement 2 2
0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5
Movement time [s] time [s]
0.7
0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 (a) Human-free (b) Human presence
Max eigenvalue of amplitude

Fig. 6: The feature distribution of eigenvalue-based scheme Fig. 7: Correlated variations at different subcarriers with
adopted by PADS [19] and DeMan [20] in TTW scenario. human movement. (a) Human-free. (b) Human presence.

the thresholds based on minimizing the Stein unbiased risk
estimate (SURE) [42]. Fig. 5 plots the CSI sequences before
and after using wavelet denoising with human moving in
the monitored area. We can see that the original noisy CSI
becomes much cleaner.
B. Human detection
1) PCA-based filtering: Existing wireless-based device-free
human detection schemes mainly exploit signal variations
along the time dimension and can be classified into two
categories. One kind of methods utilizes the temporal stability
of signal in static environment while being more dispersed
with human movement, such as the variance adopted in [8].
The other kind leverages the human movement-induced de-
correlation effect on signal between successive measurements,
such as the eigenvalue of correlation matrix in [20], which has
been proven to be more robust than the first kind. However, in
our experiments, we observe that these time dimension-based
features do not perform well in TTW scenarios, suffering from
great performance degradation. Take the superior eigenvalue-
based scheme in PADS [19] and DeMan [20] for example,
Fig. 6 plots the eigenvalue distribution of CSI data collected
in TTW scenario with green for human absence and red for
human presence. As seen, although successive measurements
still exhibit high correlation with large eigenvalues in static
environment, there is no longer a clear gap for identifying
human movement. Therefore, we have to extract a more robust
feature for TTW human detection.
Different from the time dimension-based features discussed
above, we resort to the previously insufficiently explored
subcarrier dimension information of CSI, which is usually used
to improve the reliability via frequency diversity [20] [21] [22].
In our experiments, we observe that during human movement,
there is an obvious correlation among CSI changes across all
subcarriers. Fig. 7a and Fig. 7b plot the amplitudes of CSI at
7 different subcarriers for one stream with and without human
movement, respectively. As seen in the figure, in the absence
of human movement, the CSI values of different subcarriers
contain random noise, showing little correlation, while there
exists a strong correlation among different subcarriers along
with human movement [5]. Besides, since CSI measurements
at different subcarriers may have different amplitudes due to
frequency diversity, resulting in different sensitivity to human
motion [43], a subcarrier selection scheme is needed for robust
human detection. However, different from extracting features
from each subcarrier separately in previous works, we utilize
the correlation among different subcarriers, motivating us to
select subcarriers based on the correlation rather than single
subcarrier-dependent metric, e.g., variance in [43]. In fact,
although the variations at all subcarriers are correlated, the
correlation between different subcarriers differs. As illustrated
in [40] and [43], subcarriers that are closely spaced in fre-
quency show more identical variations whereas subcarriers that
farther away show weaker correlation. Therefore, in order to
ensure the high correlation, we only extract the features from
adjacent subcarriers as shown later in the feature extraction
part.
To discover the correlations between subcarriers, we choose
to conduct PCA on each CSI stream to unveil the most com-
mon variations among different subcarriers. For this, R-TTWD
operates on the CSI time series resulting from wavelet filtering.
Denote Ht,r (i) as the N 1 dimension vector representing
the CSI values of the N = 30 subcarriers between a TX-RX
antenna pair t r for the i-th CSI sample. Then, let Ht,r
be a K N dimension matrix containing the CSI values of
N subcarriers between a TX-RX antenna pair t r for K
consecutive CSI samples.
Ht,r = [Ht,r (1), Ht,r (2), . . . , Ht,r (K )]T (5)
Each column of the matrix Ht,r represents the CSI time
series for one OFDM subcarrier. R-TTWD first normalizes
the matrix Ht,r so that each column has zero mean and unit
variance, denoted as Zt,r .
Zt,r = [Zt,r (1), Zt,r (2), . . . , Zt,r (N )] (6)
where Zt,r (i) is the normalized version of the CSI for subcar-
rier i. Then R-TTWD calculates the corresponding correlation
matrix as follows:
C(1, 1) C(1, 2) C(1, N )
C(2, 1) C(2, 2) C(2, N )
C= . .. .. .. (7)
.. . . .
C(N, 1) C(N, 2) C(N, N )
where each element C(i, j) denotes the correlation coefficient
between Zt,r (i) and Zt,r ( j) as:
C(i, j) = corr (Zt,r (i), Zt,r ( j)) (8)

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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

ZHU et al.: R-TTWD: ROBUST DEVICE-FREE THROUGH-THE-WALL DETECTION OF MOVING HUMAN WITH WIFI 7

15 15 1 1
PCA 1 PCA 1 Eigenvector 2 Eigenvector 2
Principal component values

Principal component values

PCA 2 PCA 2 Eigenvector 3 Eigenvector 3
10 10

Eigenvector values

Eigenvector values
PCA 3 PCA 3 Eigenvector 4 Eigenvector 4
PCA 4 PCA 4 Eigenvector 5 Eigenvector 5
5 PCA 5 5 PCA 5 0.5 Eigenvector 6 0.5 Eigenvector 6

0 0

5 5 0 0

10 10

15 15 0.5 0.5
0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
time [s] time [s] Subcarrier Subcarrier

(a) Top 5 principal components in (b) Top 5 principal components with (a) Eigenvectors in the human-free (b) Eigenvectors with human move-
the human-free scenario human movement scenario ment

Fig. 8: PCA of different scenarios. (a) Human-free. (b) Human Fig. 9: The remaining eigenvectors of different scenarios. (a)
movement. Human-free. (b) Human movement.

Afterwards, R-TTWD performs eigendecomposition of measurements. More specifically, we collect CSI in different
the correlation matrix to obtain the eigenvectors E = time periods of two different days and during each period, we
(e1, e2, . . . , ei ) and constructs the principal components p = collect 80 groups of data for each scenario. In Fig. 10, we use
(p1, p2, . . . , pi ) as: different shapes to denote different time periods with green
pi = Zt,r ei (9) for human-free and red for human presence. Unfortunately,
there is no clear gap between the data correspond to presence
where ei and pi are the i-th eigenvector and i-th principal
and absence of moving human as shown in Fig. 10a. This
component, respectively. Fig. 8 shows the PCA results of
is because removing the first principal component not only
human presence and absence. It can be clearly seen that the
removes noise but also eliminates some human movement
first principal components both have high variance regardless
induced signal variation. In contrast, the mean of first-order
of human movement, making them less discriminative for
difference of eigenvectors does not suffer much influence as
human detection. In fact, although the low-pass filtering can
illustrated in Fig. 10b, where we can see a clear gap, since its
remove most of the burst noise of CSI, there still remain
based on the correlation of subcarriers while the variance is
some noises caused by the internal state changes in WiFi
related to signal and environment changes. Besides, although
devices, such as transmission power changes, transmission rate
the combination of these two features has improved the
adaptation, and internal CSI reference level changes [5]. Thus,
difference between human-free and human presence as shown
we discard the most noisy projection, i.e., the first principal
in Fig. 10c, it still suffers from unsatisfactory performance due
component p1 and the first eigenvector e1 , to further sanitize
to the unsuitable variance feature. Therefore, we choose the
the CSI and use the remaining ones for feature extraction.
mean of first-order difference of eigenvector for TTW human
2) Feature extraction: Since the PCA components are
detection.
uncorrelated and the noises are mainly captured in the first
To obtain the threshold between human presence and
principal component, the further sanitized data is now clean
absence, we first conduct the Support Vector Machine
enough for TTW human detection. To obtain a robust feature
(SVM) [23] based classification on training data collected from
for human detection, we analyze both the remaining eigenvec-
different scenarios. The above mentioned features, Di f f {ei },
tors and the corresponding principal components. Through our
are used as input features of SVM and we use the top three
experiments, we gain two main observations. First, as shown
features, Di f f {e2 }, Di f f {e3 }and Di f f {e4 }, for classification,
in Fig. 8, the variance of principal components is smaller
which is demonstrated to be effective in our experiments.
in the human-free scenario. Second, the eigenvectors vary
A pre-calibrated empirical separation line is then obtained
randomly across neighboring subcarriers in the human-free
and used for future TTW human detection. Fig. 11 shows a
scenario, whereas they fluctuate more smoothly in the presence
preliminary classify result using SVM with only a few CSI
of human movement. This is because human movement results
samples and we demonstrate that its sufficient to provide a
in correlated CSI among different subcarriers as described
satisfied detection performance in our evaluation part.
before and we illustrate this in Fig. 9.
Based on these observations, we calculate the variance of
C. Multiple-antenna enhancement
principal components, V ar{pi }, for the i-th principal compo-
nent pi , and the mean of first-order difference of eigenvectors With the endorsement of MIMO in modern communication,
as: more and more WiFi devices are equipped with multiple
1 X
N antennas. Since not all wireless links are equally sensitive
Di f f {ei } = |ei (k) ei (k 1)| (10) to human movement and the sensitivity varies with link fade
N 1 k=2
level along with other factors, we propose a majority-vote
where N = 30 is the number of subcarriers and |ei (k) based detection algorithm to combat existing bad stream
ei (k 1)| is the difference between neighboring subcarri- during CSI collection. To be more specific, we apply human
ers of the i-th eigenvector. To test the effectiveness of the detection on each TX-RX antenna pair respectively and fuse
extracted features, Fig. 10 plots the V ar{pi }, Di f f {ei } and all the detection results with a majority-vote scheme for more
their combination, i.e., V ar{pi }/Di f f {ei }, for 800 groups of precise and reliable detection.

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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

8 IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017

8 0.35 300
w/o human w/o human w/o human
7 w/ human 0.3 w/ human w/ human
250
w/o human w/o human w/o human

Var {p3}/Diff {e3}

6
w/ human 0.25 w/ human w/ human
200
5 w/o human w/o human w/o human

Diff {e3}
Var {p3}

w/ human 0.2 w/ human w/ human

4 w/o human w/o human 150 w/o human
w/ human 0.15 w/ human w/ human
3
w/o human w/o human 100 w/o human
w/ human 0.1 w/ human w/ human
2
0.05 50
1

0 0 0
0 5 10 15 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0 500 1000 1500
Var {p2} Diff {e2} Var {p2}/Diff {e2}

(a) Variance of principal component: V ar {pi } (b) Mean of first-order difference of eigenvector: (c) Combination of variance of principal com-
Di f f {ei } ponent and mean of first-order difference of
eigenvector: V ar {pi }/Di f f {ei }

Fig. 10: Variance and mean of first-order difference for different scenarios over different time periods. (a) Variance of the 2nd
and 3rd principal components. (b) Mean of first-order difference of the 2nd and 3rd eigenvectors. (c) Combination of variance
of principal component and mean of first-order difference of eigenvector.

0.25

0.2
Diff {e3}

0.15

0.1

Human absence
0.05
Human presence
Support Vectors
0
0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3
Diff {e2}

Fig. 11: Preliminary classification result using SVM

VI. E XPERIMENTS AND E VALUATION

(a) Meeting room (b) Office room
In this section, we first present the prototype implementation
of R-TTWD and describe the details of experiment settings. Fig. 12: Experimental areas. (a) Meeting room. (b) Office
Afterwards, we present the evaluation of R-TTWD. room.

A. Implementation
We prototype R-TTWD with commodity WiFi devices and
evaluate its performance in a typical office building including
a 9m*6m meeting room and a 9m*5m office room. Fig. 12
P

and Fig. 13 show the experimental areas and their layout.

We use a mini PC with three antennas as the receiver and P

use two different commercial TP-Link wireless routers as the

transmitter, i.e., TL-WR742N with a single antenna and TL-
WR841N with two antennas as shown in Fig. 12. We set the
transmitter to operate in IEEE 802.11n AP mode at 2.4GHz
with 20MHz bandwidth. The receiver is equipped with Intel
5300 NIC and modified as in [15]. During the experiments, the
receiver pings packets from the router at a rate of 50 packets
per second and records the CSI from each packet.
B. Experimental methodology
Considering different wall materials, the TX and RX are
separated by a hollow wall in the meeting room while being
blocked by a concrete wall in the office room. Besides, to
test the detection sensitivity of different walking areas, we
(a) Meeting room (b) Office room
Fig. 13: Floor plan of the experimental areas. (a) Meeting
room. (b) Office room.
place the TX at the center of the monitored room and divide
the meeting room and office room into 4 walking areas,
respectively, as shown in Fig. 13. Although we achieve satis-
factory detection results under this usual deployment scheme, a
further study of different deployment strategies to assure both
the detection sensitivity and coverage will be needed when
deployed in larger scenes since better deployment position
will result in less dead spots as shown in [44] [45]. In the
meeting room, we only use single-antenna TL-WR742N as

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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

ZHU et al.: R-TTWD: ROBUST DEVICE-FREE THROUGH-THE-WALL DETECTION OF MOVING HUMAN WITH WIFI 9

1.02 1.02

1.00

0.98 1.00

0.96

Detection rate
Detection rate

0.94 0.98

0.92

0.90 0.96

0.88

0.86 0.94

TP of Meeting_1*3 TN of Meeting_1*3
0.84

0.82 TP of Office_1*3 0.92 TN of Office_1*3

0.80
TP of Office_2*3 TN of Office_2*3
0.78 0.90
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Sample time [s] Sample time [s]

(a) TP rate in different cases (b) TN rate in different cases

Fig. 14: Impact of sample time on detection accuracy. (a) True Positive Rate. (b) True Negative Rate.

the TX while using both TL-WR742N and TL-WR841N as True Negative Rate (TN): The probability that no human
the TX in the office room. Moreover, to avoid the signal presence is correctly identified.
being severely blocked by the desks and chairs, we set the
2) Impact of sample time: We first inspect the impact of
TX at the height of 1.2m in the meeting room and 0.9m
sample time on TP and TN in different experimental cases.
in the office room, respectively. For conciseness, we denote
In Fig. 14a, we can observe that the TP in all cases stays
meeting room with TL-WR742N as Meeting_1*3 and office
more than 98% with sample time more than 2 seconds,
room with TL-WR742N and TL-WR841N as Office_1*3
indicating that compared with those time-dimension based
and Office_2*3, respectively.
schemes which require a longer sample time, R-TTWD does
We collect data of two categories: 1) Static data: There is
not suffer much with sample time, being more suitable for real-
no human presence in the monitored room. 2) Moving data:
time applications. The less satisfied performance with sample
There is an individual walking around in the monitored room.
time less than 3 seconds is mainly because we allow different
We collect the training and testing dataset with 4 volunteers
participants to walk with dynamic speeds, including normal
( 3 males and 1 female ) of different ages and body shapes.
and slow, which may results in no noticeable movement
Specifically, we gain the training data from only one volunteer
during too short sample time. Besides, even with 1 second
while test R-TTWD with both the same person and the others.
sample time, the office room with 2*3 MIMO gains a TP of
During the experiments, the participants are required to walk
89.71%, much better than the cases with 1*3 MIMO, verifying
randomly in each walking area with both their normal and
the effectiveness of employing multi-antenna enhancement.
slow speeds.
Considering TN in Fig. 14b, the TN of all cases keeps stable
To evaluate the robustness of R-TTWD, we collect data in
around 99% as the sample time increases, except in the office
three different working days for each TX-RX combination,
room with 2*3 MIMO where there exists some performance
lasting 9 days in total. More specifically, we gather data in
decline. This is because with the increasing sample time, more
different time periods of each day, i.e., morning, afternoon
noise may be included in the data in human-free scenario and
and evening, and measure 160 sets of data each time, 80
the static environment could undergo greater changes, e.g.,
for human-free and 80 for human presence, including 20
weather conditions, during the data collection in the office
for each walking area. Particularly, we collect 1440 sets of
room with 2*3 MIMO. Therefore, to balance the TP and TN
data for each TX-RX combination, of which each data set
in all cases, we choose the sample time of 3 seconds and use
contains 10 seconds of data. In total, we collect about 2100k
it for our evaluation below.
CSI records. For TTW human detection, we first employ the
well-known SVM with the top three features, i.e., Di f f {e2 }, 3) Impact of number of features: Fig. 15 shows the de-
Di f f {e3 } and Di f f {e4 }, to obtain a threshold line, based on tection performance of R-TTWD using different number of
a portion of measurements, which is only 80 groups of data features. As illustrated in Fig. 15, with the number of features
from the morning of the first day, 40 for each category, in our increased, the TN increases while the TP undergoes some
experiment. loss in all cases. This is because the features we extract is
based on the correlation among different subcarriers, which
is mainly captured in the first several eigenvectors, adding
C. Performance evaluation
more features does not necessarily result in higher detection
1) Evaluation metrics: We focus on the following metrics rate. In fact, the added eigenvectors vary more randomly than
for evaluating the performance of R-TTWD. the top ones, such as the fifth eigenvector shown in Fig. 9,
True Positive Rate (TP): The probability that a moving containing less useful information for human detection. The
human presence is correctly detected. number of features is empirically selected to achieve a good

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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

10 IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017

1.01 1.01

1.00 1.00
Detection rate

Detection rate
0.99 0.99

0.98 0.98

0.97 0.97

TP of Meeting_1*3 TN of Meeting_1*3

0.96 TP of Office_1*3 0.96 TN of Office_1*3

TP of Office_2*3 TN of Office_2*3
0.95 0.95
2 3 4 5 2 3 4 5

Number of features Number of features

(a) TP rate in different cases (b) TN rate in different cases

Fig. 15: Impact of number of features on detection accuracy. (a) True Positive Rate. (b) True Negative Rate.

1.00 1.00

0.99 0.98

0.98 0.96

0.97 0.94
Detection rate

Detection rate

0.96 0.92

0.95 0.90

0.94 0.88
RX_A RX_A
0.93 0.86
RX_B RX_B
0.92 0.84
RX_C RX_C
0.91 0.82
Majority-vote Majority-vote
0.90 0.80

Meeting_1*3 Office_1*3 TX_1 of TX_2 of Meeting_1*3 Office_1*3 TX_1 of TX_2 of

Office_2*3 Office_2*3 Office_2*3 Office_2*3

Experimental cases Experimental cases

(a) TP rate in different cases (b) TN rate in different cases

Fig. 16: Impact of multiple antennas on detection accuracy. (a) True Positive Rate. (b) True Negative Rate.

tradeoff between TP and TN, and can be adjusted according to
different application requirements. Since using three features
results in detection rate of more than 98% for both TP and TN,
we choose three features for classification in our experiments
and use it for the evaluation below.
4) Impact of multiple antennas: In order to evaluate the
performance enhancement with multiple antennas, we compare
our majority-vote based scheme with single TX-RX antenna
pair-based detection in Fig. 16. We denote the three RX
antennas as RX_A, RX_B and RX_C, and divide the
Office_2*3 into two cases, i.e., TX_1 of Office_2*3 and
TX_2 of Office_2*3, according to the transmit antenna used.
As shown in Fig. 16, there indeed exists a bad TX-RX
link that results in poor detection accuracy, such as RX_A
in Meeting_1*3. Another interesting observation is that the
bad TX-RX link does not remain the same in different
experimental cases indicating that we cannot simply choose
a constant TX-RX link to avoid bad link. In Fig. 16,
we also see that our majority-vote based multiple-antenna
fusion scheme achieves an excellent performance in all cases,
ensuring the reliability and robustness of R-TTWD.
5) Comparison with state-of-the-art: So far, we have dis-
cussed the parameter selection of R-TTWD. In order to verify
the advantages of R-TTWD, we need to compare R-TTWD
with the state-of-the-art TTW detection systems. Since there
has not been any prior works specially designed for the TTW
human detection with commodity devices, and the recent
human detection systems using commodity devices all rely on
time-dimension based features, we compare R-TTWD with the
most widely adopted time-correlation based human detection
scheme. To be more specific, we compare R-TTWD with the
eigenvalue-based method used in DeMan [20]. In DeMan,
the authors leverage both the amplitude and calibrated phase
of CSI for human detection. By calculating the respective
correlation matrices for amplitudes and phases of successive
CSI measurements, DeMan derives the maximum eigenvalues
of both matrices for moving human detection. For fair com-
parison, we also apply wavelet denoising on the CSI before
extracting eigenvalue from the correlation matrix and apply
our majority-vote based algorithm in DeMan [20]. Besides,
we also test the detection performance using the variance of
principal components mentioned before, denoted as Variance-

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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

ZHU et al.: R-TTWD: ROBUST DEVICE-FREE THROUGH-THE-WALL DETECTION OF MOVING HUMAN WITH WIFI 11

1.0 1.0

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7
Detection rate

Detection rate
0.6 0.6

0.5 0.5

0.4 Eigenvalue-based 0.4 Eigenvalue-based

0.3 Variance-based 0.3 Variance-based

0.2 R-TTWD 0.2 R-TTWD

0.1 0.1

0.0 0.0
Meeting_1*3 Office_1*3 Office_2*3 Meeting_1*3 Office_1*3 Office_2*3

Experimental cases Experimental cases

(a) TP rate in different cases (b) TN rate in different cases

Fig. 17: Detection accuracy using different features. (a) True Positive Rate. (b) True Negative Rate.

based in Fig. 17.
Fig. 17 plots the detection accuracy using different features,
from which we have three observations. First, it can be
clearly seen that eigenvalue-based scheme suffers from great
performance degradation in TTW scenario with a worst TP
rate below 10% and a TN rate of 100%. This is because the
eigenvalue-based scheme relies on the temporal correlation
of signal in static environment, while in TTW scenario,
the human movement-induced de-correlation effect becomes
unnoticeable. Second, the variance-based method performs
well in detecting human presence with a less satisfied TN rate
since variance is more sensitive to human presence as well as
dynamic environmental changes. Moreover, the variance-based
detection rate is higher with meeting_1*3 than office_1*3
due to less signal attenuation caused by the hollow wall than
concrete wall, while the signal loss can be compensated via
more antennas in office_2*3 as shown in Fig. 17. Third,
R-TTWD outperforms both eigenvalue-based and variance-
based methods, with the average detection rate of both TP
and TN more than 99%, demonstrating the superiority of the
subcarrier dimension-based feature over those time dimension-
based features. The result is as expected, since R-TTWD only
relies on the correlation across different subcarriers regardless
of different signal strength, signal power and environment
changes. Besides, since we perform our experiments during
working days, there are people walking outside the monitored
room or along the corridor every now and then, demonstrating
R-TTWDs robustness to irrelevant people.
6) Long time test: Since all the results shown above are
based on the testing set collected within three days after
training the system, we are interested in knowing whether R-
TTWD will still perform well if the testing occurs much later
in time, which could lead to performance degradation because
of changes in the environment or mobility pattern changes with
different subjects. This feature has not been explored in previ-
ous works [19] [20]. To achieve this, we further test R-TTWD
with data collected fifty days after the training. Specifically, we
employ a new volunteer and ask him to walk randomly in each
walking area with both normal and slow speeds, and collect
TABLE I: R-TTWD performance over 50 days after the
training.
Meeting_1*3 Office_1*3 Office_2*3
TP 99.58% 100% 99.17%
TN 100% 100% 98.33%
TABLE II: Detection accuracy across different environments
with a pre-calibrated threshold.
Office_1*3 TX_1 of Office_2*3 TX_2 of Office_2*3
TP 100% 100% 99.86%
TN 98.61% 93.61% 94.72%
data in different periods for one day in each experimental
case. Table I illustrates the overall performance of R-TTWD
over the long testing period. The result demonstrates that R-
TTWD maintains its excellent performance even with test data
collected fifty days later without recalibration, verifying its
robustness. Besides, we notice a even slightly better TP rate
with the new volunteer. This is because the body shape of
the new volunteer is somewhat bigger than the training one,
causing more obvious signal variations during walking.
7) Generalization across different environments: Although
we have demonstrated R-TTWDs excellent performance in
different cases and R-TTWD only requires slight prior efforts,
i.e., 4 minutes in our experiments, to obtain a threshold
for each case, a system that can generalize across different
environments would be more desirable for real-world appli-
cations. Thus, to test R-TTWDs resilience to environmental
changes, we calibrate the threshold with the training data from
meeting_1*3 and evaluate R-TTWD with the data collected
in office_1*3 and office_2*3. More specifically, we divide
the data from office_2*3 into two datasets according to the
transmit antenna used. Table II illustrates the detection result
with different test datasets using the pre-calibrated threshold.
As seen, the TP rate is almost 100% regardless of different
test datasets while the TN rate suffers from some decline in
office_2*3. This is because according to our experiments, the
extracted features of human-free scenario spread more ran-

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JSAC.2017.2679578, IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
12
domly while being more concentrated with human movement
as shown in Fig. 10b. Considering the different transmitters
adopted and the longer time span between the training data
and the test data of office_2*3, we believe that the detection
accuracy is acceptable and we can further employ a user
feedback loop to recalibrate R-TTWD in case of severe per-
formance degradation. Although not having been thoroughly
investigated, this result provides a preliminary proof that
R-TTWD can fit various environments and even different
commercial Wi-Fi devices without requiring frequent training
and we will perform a more comprehensive study in our future
work.
VII. D ISCUSSIONS AND F UTURE W ORKS
A. Device-free static human detection
Although R-TTWD can detect moving human with different
materials and speeds within 3 seconds, our system has not
been able to detect static people yet. Device-free static human
detection has always been a more challenging problem than
moving human detection since it does not cause obvious signal
variations, especially in through-the-wall scenario. A widely
employed method is to utilize the signal strength attenuation
caused by the presence of static human. The shadowing-based
RTI [9] uses the difference of average signal strength between
human-free and static human presence to identify human p-
resence. However, this method requires dense link deployment
which is inapplicable with a single pair of wireless devices
in our experiment. Besides, the multipath fading can even
cause the signal strength to increase when a human obstruct
the link. Instead of using the shadow effect, DeMan [20]
proposes to consider human breathing as an intrinsic indicator
of static human presence. Leveraging wireless signal to detect
vital signals, e.g., respiration and heartbeat, of human non-
intrusively is a promising technology and has been studied
by a lot of researchers. However, existing detection systems,
e.g., Wi-Sleep [46] and [43], are only applicable in LOS
situation, while the significantly attenuated signal after passing
the wall prevents us from extracting useful features for human
breathing detection. Although WiTrack 2.0 [12] and Vital-
Radio [47] can detect respiration of static human even in
through-the-wall scenario, they employ the dedicated FMCW
radio which is unavailable with current COTS wireless devices.
Since MUSIC [48] algorithm can estimate the angles at which
a wireless signal from a transmitter arrives at the receiver,
we can leverage the signal strength variation from different
angles to determine static human existence as in WiDraw [49].
However, there still exist several challenges to be solved,
such as the limited antenna number of commodity devices
and intrinsic weak signals in through-the-wall scenario. We
envision a static human detection module to be included in
our future work.
B. A more challenging TTW scenario
Although R-TTWD leverages the already deployed WiFi AP
within the monitored room for TTW detection, there exists
a more challenging scenario where both TX and RX are
deployed outside of the room since the signal reflected from
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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017
Fig. 18: System deployment with both TX and RX outside of
the meeting room.
the target needs to traverse the wall twice (in and out of the
room). Besides, when both devices are deployed outside of the
room, the reflections off the wall itself is much stronger than
the reflections from the human inside the room, preventing us
from detecting the minute human-induced variation, which is
also known as Flash Effect since it is analogous to how
a mirror in front of a camera reflects the cameras flash
and prevents it from capturing objects in the scene [10].
Traditional radar community eliminates the flash effect by
isolating the reflected signals based on their arrival time while
requiring multiple GHz of bandwidth [50]. A more recent work
realized in a 20MHz-wide WiFi channel, Wi-Vi [10], performs
a costly MIMO interference nulling process to counteract
the flash effect using USRP N210 radios and directional
antennas. Since we only employ commodity wireless devices
with omnidirectional antennas, e.g., TL-WR742N, to evaluate
the performance of our system in this scenario, R-TTWD has
to operate in the presence of high interference caused by wall
reflections and the direct signal from the transmit to the receive
antenna. Specifically, we choose the low-attenuation material
for evaluation, i.e., hollow wall, and deploy TX and RX along
the hollow wall of the meeting room as shown in Fig. 18.
We collect data from three different days and train the system
the same way as before. With the same parameters analyzed
above, R-TTWD achieves a TP rate of 84.71% and a TN rate
of 90% among which the detection rate of area D is 100%. As
analyzed before, these unsatisfied TP and TN rates are due to
the weaker signals obtained in this more challenging scenario.
Therefore, to apply R-TTWD in this scenario, we have to deal
with several challenges, such as filtering irrelevant reflections
and boosting the power of human-induced signals. Although
challenging, detecting people in this scenario is critical for
some situations, such as search and rescue after earthquake,
and we envision a unified framework for both TTW scenarios
in the near future.
VIII. C ONCLUSION
With the rapid development of mobile network, device-
free technology has received increasing attention recently and
paves the way for a new human-in-the-loop architecture with
better system efficiency and user experience. In this paper, we
present the design and implementation of R-TTWD, a robust
through-the-wall human detection system with commodity
WiFi devices. Since a simple low-pass filter is not enough
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JSAC.2017.2679578, IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
ZHU et al.: R-TTWD: ROBUST DEVICE-FREE THROUGH-THE-WALL DETECTION OF MOVING HUMAN WITH WIFI
for data sanitization, we further apply a PCA-based filtering
to gain clean data for human detection. Afterwards, we exploit
the correlated changes over different subcarriers and propose
a subcarrier dimension-based feature, the mean of first-order
difference of eigenvector, for TTW human detection. We
prototype R-TTWD in two important indoor environments
and conduct extensive experiments over 9 days, considering
different walking speeds, wall materials, weather conditions,
etc. The evaluation results demonstrate the sensitivity and
robustness of R-TTWD in various environments, with both
average TP and TN more than 99%, outperforming existing
time dimension-based schemes. To further verify R-TTWDs
robustness over time, we test R-TTWD with test data collected
fifty days after the training and demonstrate its effective-
ness without requiring racalibration. Besides, we have also
preliminarily proved that R-TTWD requires no prerequisite
environment-tailored threshold calibration, being promising
for practical TTW human detection and other pertinent ap-
plications.
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Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

14 IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XX 2017

[45] Z. Zhou, Z. Yang, C. Wu, Y. Liu, and L. M. Ni, On Multipath Link Panlong Yang (M02) received the B.S., M.S., and
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2015. Hefei, China. His research interests include wire-
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IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. cognitive radio networks. Dr. Yang is a member of
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Hai Zhu received the B.E. degree in 2013 from

Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunica-
tions, Nanjing, China, where he is currently working
toward the Ph.D. degree in information network.
His current research interests are wireless sensor
networks and mobile computing.

Fu Xiao (M12) received the Ph.D Degree in Com-

puter Science and Technology from Nanjing Univer-
sity of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in
2007. He is currently a Professor and PhD supervisor
with the School of Computer, Nanjing University of
Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China. His
main research interests are wireless sensor networks
and mobile computing. Dr. Xiao is a member of
the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for
Computing Machinery.

Lijuan Sun received Ph.D in Information and Com-

munication from Nanjing University of Posts and
Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2007. She
is currently a Professor and PhD supervisor with the
School of Computer, Nanjing University of Posts
and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China. Her main
research interests are wireless sensor networks and
wireless mesh networks.

Ruchuan Wang received the B.S. Degree in Cal-

culation Mathematics from Information Engineering
University, Beijing, China in 1968. He is currently
a Professor and PhD supervisor with the School of
Computer, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecom-
munications, Nanjing, China. His main research in-
terests are Wireless Sensor Networks, information
security and computer software.

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