Device-Free Wireless Sensing for Human Detection: The Deep Learning Perspective

Currently, developments in wireless sensing technologies have shown that wireless signals can be employed to transmit information between wireless communication devices and are also able to realize passive target wireless sensing. Wireless sensing has diverse Internet-of-Things applications in indoor human detection, such as in device-free localization, activity recognition and fall detection, respiration detection, gait recognition, user identification, and so forth. Deep learning (DL), with the latest breakthroughs in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), seems to be a feasible technique for device-free wireless sensing (DFWS) and human detection in a more intelligent and autonomous manner. Although DL has attracted wide spread attention in computer vision (CV), AI games, speech recognition, automated vehicles, and other fields, its application in wireless sensing systems (WSSs) is relatively new, and little attention has been paid to it. Motivated by these developments, this article clarifies the motivation and mechanism of the DL-aided WSSs for human detection. First, we survey the most advanced architecture of DL that may be powerful for WSSs. We also review conventional ML and DL approaches to human detection based on red green blue (RGB)/depth camera and radar: one reason is to introduce the successful experience in these areas to the field of wireless sensing and another reason is that the possibility of combining and fusing information from the heterogeneous types of sensors is expected to improve the overall performance of practical human detection systems. We provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art research on wireless sensing for human detection with a focus on WSSs. Furthermore, a general structure of the DL-based WSS is introduced in detail for hitherto unexplored applications and future wireless sensing scenarios. We also discuss some open research issues in wireless sensing for human detection, including data acquisition for DL model training, calibration of signals from commercial devices, multimodal sensing, simultaneous user identification and activity recognition, multiuser human detection, and generalization ability of DL models, to indicate future research directions.