The Journal of Engineering

IET International Radar Conference (IRC 2018)

Through-the-wall imaging using Wi-Fi signals eISSN 2051-3305

Received on 21st February 2019
Revised 8th June 2019
Accepted on 10th June 2019
E-First on 30th August 2019
doi: 10.1049/joe.2019.0544
www.ietdl.org

Wei Zhong1, Kai He1, Lianlin Li1

1KeyLaboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing 100871,
People's Republic of China
E-mail: lianlin.li@pku.edu.cn

Abstract: In this work, the authors experimentally investigate the high-resolution three-dimensional through-the-wall imaging
exploiting commodity Wi-Fi signals in an indoor environment. The authors also provide physical insights into this novel imaging
strategy, which has been derived from the Huygens' principle. In the authors’ experiments, a pair of antennas are used to
acquire the Wi-Fi signals reflected from the scene in a synthetic aperture mode. The classical filtered back propagation (FBP)
algorithm is then used to form the image based on these signals. The authors use an IEEE 802.11n protocol wireless router
working at 2.4 GHz with bandwidth of 20 MHz. It can be faithfully expected that such imaging technique can open an exciting
new door for various practical applications including safety screening and others.

1 Introduction Eref rref ; ω = ∫ S G rref , r′; ω N r′; ω dr′ . (1)

Through-the-wall imaging using radio frequency signals has
become a popular technique in diverse areas such as subsurface
exploration, surveillance, life rescue operations, search, to name a
few [1–3]. As we known, the ultra wide band (UWB) radar is a
commonly used system for such purpose, where a very wide band
is desirable in order to achieve the high range resolution. However,
the UWB radar technique suffers from relatively expensive
hardware deployment costs and most of through-the-wall systems
operate in an active manner, which means that both transmitting
and receiving functions must be taken into consideration.
With the increasing deployment of wireless local area network
(IEEE 802.11) technologies, electromagnetic signals based on this
standard have become ubiquitous in many places, especially in
urban areas and indoor environments. The Wi-Fi equipment such
as wireless AP is cheap and for aesthetics, wireless routers in
public places are highly concealed. Numerous efforts have been
made to explore Wi-Fi signals to achieve different low cost indoor
surveillance tasks. Motivated by this consideration, we now
consider how to explore the Wi-Fi signals to perform the through-
the-wall imaging in this work. To this end, we first give physical
insights into such imaging technique, which has been derived from
the well-known Huygens' principle. Then, the data acquisition has
been realised in a synthetic aperture way, where two antennas
receive the Wi-Fi signal, one as the scanning antenna and the other
as the reference (fixed) antenna. We use a 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.11n
protocol wireless router with the bandwidth of 20 MHz. Finally,
the classical back-propagation algorithm [filtered back propagation
(FBP)] is used to process the calibrated Wi-Fi signals and produce
three-dimensional (3D) images.
2 Methodology
We use the 2.4-GHz IEEE 802.11n protocol Wi-Fi router with the
bandwidth of 20 MHz in this work. Consider a closed sphere S
surrounding the investigation domain denoted by Dinv, where no
any other sources exist. All Wi-Fi sources are randomly located
outside S. Assuming that the Wi-Fi signal received by the reference
antenna fixed at rref is denoted by Eref rref ; ω , while the signal
received by the scanning antenna at rsca is denoted by Esca rsca; ω ,
where ω denotes the angular frequency of Wi-Fi signals. In light of
Huygens' principle, put formally, we can express these signals in
the following forms, i.e.
Esca rsca; ω = ∫ S G rsca, r′; ω N r′; ω dr′ . (2)
Here G ⋅ denotes the scalar 3D Green function in free space,
N r′; ω denotes i.i.d. random Wi-Fi sources at r′ distributed over
the sphere S. Furthermore, since the Wi-Fi sources at r and r′ are
statistical independent, we have
N r, ω , N* r′, ω = δ r − r′ c ω . (3)
Here <> denotes the statistical coherence operation, δ ⋅ denotes
impulse function, c ω denotes the square of signal in frequency
domain, ()* denotes conjugate transpose operation.
Then the inner product of the signal at rref and the signal at rsca
can be denoted as (4)
Eref rref ; ω , Esca rsca; ω
(4)
= G rref , rsca; ω − G* rscs, rref ; ω c ω .
From (4) it can be observed that the result of the statistical
coherence of Wi-Fi signals received by the reference antenna and
scanning antenna is approximately equivalent to the scenario of
active imaging, i.e. the reference antenna equivalently acts like a
transmitting antenna, and the scanning antenna as a receiving
antenna for acquiring the signal from the reference antenna. In this
way, the problem of passive imaging can be turned into that of
active imaging. Therefore, after the coherence processing as
characterised by (4), we can perform any conventional imaging
algorithm to achieve the desirable image.
We use two antennas to receive the Wi-Fi signal, one as the
scanning antenna and the other as the reference antenna. Iref t
defines the signal received by the reference antenna in time
domain, Isca t defines the signal received by the scanning antenna
in time domain. Then we perform Fourier transform for the signal,
and we get Iref f and Isca f , respectively. We define Rcov as the
correlation result of Iref f and Isca f
Rcov = F Iref t
~
* F Isca t . (5)
Here F demotes the Fourier transform.

J. Eng., 2019, Vol. 2019 Iss. 20, pp. 6940-6942 6940

This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License
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Fig. 1 Experimental setup

Fig. 3 Images at the different slices along the z direction. A single Wi-Fi
Fig. 2 Retrieved Wi-Fi hologram calculated by (5), where router is present in the environment
(a), (b) Are the distributions of magnitude and phase of statistical coherence of Wi-Fi (a) z = 10 cm, (b) z = 30 cm, (c) z = 60 cm, (d) z = 70 cm, (e) z = 90 cm, (f) z = 100 cm,
signals, respectively (g) z = 120 cm, (h) z = 150 cm, (i) z = 160 cm

We use a wireless router as the Wi-Fi emitter, and we use two

antennas, one as the reference antenna and the other as the
scanning antenna, the reference antenna is stick in one place, and
scanning antenna placed at the scanning shelves. The target object
is put between the scanning antenna and the wireless router. Two
antennas are all connected to the oscilloscope to obtain data. There
is a wall between target object and two target antennas.
To get enough data to generate an image, we move the scanning
antenna in S-type motion track and stick the reference antenna in
one place, as shown in Fig. 1. Whenever the scanning antenna
moves to the next place, the oscilloscope will collect data from the
two antennas. We use back-projection imaging algorithm to
generate the image. In order to get a better image, we do minus the
background and then divided by the background. Figs. 2a and b
show the magnitude and angle of electromagnetic field of the
background, respectively
Fig. 4
BPobj − BPbg (a) Seated human subject, (b) The image obtained by the proposed methodology
IMG = , (6)
BPbg
of the distance further away from the scanning platform, the image
where BPobj denotes the back-projection data with the object, BPbg is gradually focused at the location of the Wi-Fi router. In Fig. 4b,
denotes the back-projection data without the object, and IMG we show the image of human body, which is also consistent with
denotes the final image we get. the real scene in Fig. 4a.

3 Experimental results 4 Conclusion

In this example, we consider a real person as the target object. A
person seat on a paper box. The paper box is ∼100 cm distance to
the scanning shelves, the scanning area of the scanning antenna is
∼117 cm in the x direction while 130 cm in the y direction. We
perform the FBP algorithm at different distances along the z
direction. Fig. 3 shows the imaging results corresponding to
different depths. In Figs. 3a and b, we can hardly see any profile of
any part of human body. When it comes to Figs. 3c–e, the profile
of human body's arms and legs become clear. With the growth of
depth, we can see that the body trunk becomes gradually clear in
Figs. 3f and g. The position of human body in z direction is from
60 to 120 cm, which is consistent with these images in Fig. 3. From
these results, one can see that the best focused image is observed
around the true range distance of 0.7 m. Moreover, with the growth
This work presents for the first time the experimental results of the
high-resolution 3D through-the-wall imaging using the everyday
Wi-Fi signals. It can be faithfully expected that such imaging
technique can open an exciting new door for various practical
applications including safety screening and others.
5 References
[1] Li, L., Zhang, W., Li, F.: ‘A novel autofocusing approach for real-time
through-wall imaging under unknown wall characteristics’, IEEE Trans.
Geosci. Remote Sens., 2010, 48, pp. 423–431
[2] Huang, D., Nandakumar, R., Gollakota, S.: ‘Feasbility and limits of Wi-Fi
imaging’. Proc. of the 12th ACM Conf. on Embedded Network Sensor
Systems, Memphis, USA, November 2014, pp. 266–279
[3] Holl, P.M., Reinhard, F.: ‘Holography of Wi-Fi radiation’, Phys. Rev. Lett.,
2017, 118, p. 183901

J. Eng., 2019, Vol. 2019 Iss. 20, pp. 6940-6942 6941

This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
6942 J. Eng., 2019, Vol. 2019 Iss. 20, pp. 6940-6942
This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)