Technology

60126 readers

3105 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

465

Scientists Use WiFi to See Through People's Walls (www.popularmechanics.com)

submitted 11 months ago by gedaliyah to c/technology

108 comments fedilink hide all child comments

“We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Maggoty 17 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Duh? I don't think anyone with the right field of study thought this wasn't possible. It just doesn't have good use cases.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm an EE, and I have serious doubt about this actually working nearly as good as they are putting it. This sort of stuff is hard, even with purpose built radar systems. I'm working with angle estimation in Multipath environments, and that shit fucks your signals up. This may work it you have extremely precisely characterised the target room and walls, and a ton of stuff around it, and then don't change anything but the motion of the people. But that's not practical.

[–] Maggoty 4 points 11 months ago

It's Popular Mechanics, of course it doesn't work as well as they say it does. But the theory has been around a long time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

You are correct, at best this requires some a priori knowledge of the room. You can kind of do basic motion detection blindly though. They are just measuring the channel response via the 802.11 preambles, so for basic presence detection knowing that the channel response is changing is enough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I was under the impression these experiments required a pre mapped room with EM readings. I don't think they can watch you like if it was an X-ray but I'd believe it if they could track blobs of moving mass.

[–] deafboy 5 points 11 months ago

Full body vr tracking without sensors?

The human presence sensors based on this are already on the consumer market, we just need to dial up the sensitivity.

[–] brianorca 3 points 11 months ago

There are already smart light bulbs you can buy off the shelf that use radio signals to see when somebody is in the room. Then it can turn on the lights automatically, without a camera or infrared sensor in the area.