Cross-Environment Device-Free Human Action Recognition via Wi-Fi Signals

Human action recognition (HAR) based on Wi-Fi signals has become a research hotspot due to its advantages of privacy protection, a comfortable experience, and a reliable recognition effect. However, the performance of existing Wi-Fi-based HAR systems is vulnerable to changes in environments and shows poor system generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose a cross-environment HAR system (CHARS) based on the channel state information (CSI) of Wi-Fi signals for the recognition of human activities in different indoor environments. To achieve good performance for cross-environment HAR, a two-stage action recognition method is proposed. In the first stage, an HAR adversarial network is designed to extract robust action features independent of environments. Through the maximum–minimum learning scheme, the aim is to narrow the distribution gap between action features extracted from the source and the target (i.e., new) environments without using any label information from the target environment, which is beneficial for the generalization of the cross-environment HAR system. In the second stage, a self-training strategy is introduced to further extract action recognition information from the target environment and perform secondary optimization, enhancing the overall performance of the cross-environment HAR system. The results of experiments show that the proposed system achieves more reliable performance in target environments, demonstrating the generalization ability of the proposed CHARS to environmental changes.