freeGait: Liberalizing Wireless-based Gait Recognition to Mitigate Non-gait Human Behaviors

Recently, WiFi-based gait recognition technologies have been widely studied. However, most of them work on a strong assumption that users need to walk continuously and periodically under a constant body posture. Thus, a significant challenge arises when users engage in non-periodic or discontinuous behaviors (e.g., stopping and going, turning around during walking). This is because variations of non-gait behaviors interfere with the extraction of gait-related features, resulting in recognition performance degradation. To solve this problem, we propose freeGait, which aims to mitigate the user's non-gait behaviors of WiFi-based gait recognition system. Specifically, we model this problem as domain adaptation, by learning domain-independent representations to extract behavior-independent gait features. We consider human behaviors with labels of users as source domains, and human behaviors without labels of users as target domains. However, directly applying domain adaptation to our specific problem is challenging, because the classification boundaries of the unknown target domains are unclear for WiFi signals. We align the posterior distributions of the source and target domains, and constrain the conditional distribution of the target domains to optimize the gait classification accuracy. To obtain enough source domains data, we build a data augmentation module to generate data similar to the labeled data, and use supervised learning to make the data different between users. We conduct experiments with 20 people and 3 different scenarios, and the results show that accurate predictions of a total of 15 domains data can be achieved by only collecting and labeling a small amount of data from 6 source domains, and user classification accuracy can be improved by up to 45% compared to other existing techniques.