Si-FI: Learning the Beamforming Feedback for Simultaneous Multi-Subject Sensing

There has been significant progress in Wi-Fi sensing applications pertaining to home surveillance, remote healthcare, and home entertainment among others. However, most of the work leverages manual extraction of Channel State Information (CSI) from Wi-Fi network interface card (NIC) and targets single-subject sensing. In this work, we devise a simultaneous multi-subject sensing strategy that can adapt to different environments and people being monitored. Si-FI leverages standard-compliant beamforming feedback information (BFI) as a proxy of CSI to characterize the propagation environment. Unlike CSI, BFI (i) can be captured without any firmware modifications and (ii) captures the multiple channels between the access point and the stations without any direct access to the sensing devices. Thus, conversely, from existing work, the edge server in Si-FI records the BFI of the channels between Access Point (AP) and all the stations (STAs) (sensing devices) with a single capture, reducing the channel occupation, transmission and system latency dramatically. To achieve generalization over unseen environments and people, we develop a few-shot learning algorithm named Si-FI FREL to operate with beamforming feedback angles (BFAs) (compressed BFI). We validate Si-FI through an extensive data collection campaign in 3 different environments and 3 subjects performing 20 different activities simultaneously. We demonstrate that Si-FI achieves classification accuracy of up to 99 %, while Si-FI FREL improves the accuracy up to 27 % when compared to the state-of-the-art domain adaptation algorithm. Si-FI reduces the system latency by 50 % and channel occupation by 110 KB per sample for each sensing device compared to the state-of-the-art simultaneous multi-subject sensing work.