WiFiEye -- Seeing over WiFi Made Accessible

Abstract

While commonly used for communication purposes, an increasing number of recent studies consider WiFi for sensing. In particular, wireless signals are altered (e.g., reflected and attenuated) by the human body and objects in the environment. This can be perceived by an observer to infer information on human activities or changes in the environment and, hence, to "see" over WiFi. Until now, works on WiFi-based sensing have resulted in a set of custom software tools - each designed for a specific purpose. Moreover, given how scattered the literature is, it is difficult to even identify all steps/functions necessary to build a basic system for WiFi-based sensing. This has led to a high entry barrier, hindering further research in this area. There has been no effort to integrate these tools or to build a general software framework that can serve as the basis for further research, e.g., on using machine learning to interpret the altered WiFi signals. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose WiFiEye - a generic software framework that makes all necessary steps/functions available "out of the box". This way, WiFiEye allows researchers to easily bootstrap new WiFi-based sensing applications, thereby, focusing on research rather than on implementation aspects. To illustrate WiFiEye's workflow, we present a case study on WiFi-based human activity recognition.