A Survey on CSI-Based Human Behavior Recognition in Through-the-Wall Scenario

Recent years have witnessed increasing research interest in human behavior recognition as it provides attractive applications in various sensing scenarios. Among these encouraging implementations, device-free behavior recognition based on WiFi channel state information (CSI) has attracted significant attention due to the popularity of WiFi devices and abundant channel characteristics from CSI. Meanwhile, the CSI signal provides us with additional benefits because it can propagate through a wall. This through-the-wall and device-free scheme not only enables us to identify specific human actions but also to infer person activities by collecting the data from different rooms. This paper presents a survey on the state-of-art progresses in device-free through-the-wall human behavior recognition based on CSI. Specifically, this paper first introduces the basic concept of CSI and describes the signal variation caused by human behavior. Then, it illustrates that different human behaviors can cause signal transformation. Therefore, the unique map relationship between action and signal variation can be leveraged to recognize human behavior. Next, it provides the general architecture of through-the-wall behavior recognition and highlights its core characteristic. It investigates the state-of-art applications in various scenarios and analyzes specific design schemes and implementations. Afterward, it discusses the various across wall applications and makes a detailed comparison between non-through-the-wall and through-the-wall applications. Meanwhile, it analyzes many factors that affect recognition accuracy and emphasizes performance differences under across wall scenarios. Finally, this paper concludes by summarizing the issues and challenges faced and providing insights into the possible solution and future research trend.