arXiv subjects

Panlong Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Panlong Yang.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

RINN: One Sample Radio Frequency Imaging based on Physics Informed Neural Network

Due to its ability to work in non-line-of-sight and low-light environments, radio frequency (RF) imaging technology is expected to bring new possibilities for embodied intelligence and multimodal sensing. However, widely used RF devices (such as Wi-Fi) often struggle to provide high-precision electromagnetic measurements and large-scale datasets, hindering the application of RF imaging technology. In this paper, we combine the ideas of PINN to design the RINN network, using physical constraints instead of true value comparison constraints and adapting it with the characteristics of ubiquitous RF signals, allowing the RINN network to achieve RF imaging using only one sample without phase and with amplitude noise. Our numerical evaluation results show that compared with 5 classic algorithms based on phase data for imaging results, RINN's imaging results based on phaseless data are good, with indicators such as RRMSE (0.11) performing similarly well. RINN provides new possibilities for the universal development of radio frequency imaging technology.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Real-Time Fall Detection Using Smartphone Accelerometers and WiFi Channel State Information

In recent years, as the population ages, falls have increasingly posed a significant threat to the health of the elderly. We propose a real-time fall detection system that integrates the inertial measurement unit (IMU) of a smartphone with optimized Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) for secondary validation. Initially, the IMU distinguishes falls from routine daily activities with minimal computational demand. Subsequently, the CSI is employed for further assessment, which includes evaluating the individual's post-fall mobility. This methodology not only achieves high accuracy but also reduces energy consumption in the smartphone platform. An Android application developed specifically for the purpose issues an emergency alert if the user experiences a fall and is unable to move. Experimental results indicate that the CSI model, based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), achieves a detection accuracy of 99%, \revised{surpassing comparable IMU-only models, and demonstrating significant resilience in distinguishing between falls and non-fall activities.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

The Field-based Model: A New Perspective on RF-based Material Sensing

This paper introduces the design and implementation of WiField, a WiFi sensing system deployed on COTS devices that can simultaneously identify multiple wavelength-level targets placed flexibly. Unlike traditional RF sensing schemes that focus on specific targets and RF links, WiField focuses on all media in the sensing area for the entire electric field. In this perspective, WiField provides a unified framework to finely characterize the diffraction, scattering, and other effects of targets at different positions, materials, and numbers on signals. The combination of targets in different positions, numbers, and sizes is just a special case. WiField proposed a scheme that utilizes phaseless data to complete the inverse mapping from electric field to material distribution, thereby achieving the simultaneous identification of multiple wavelength-level targets at any position and having the potential for deployment on a wide range of low-cost COTS devices. Our evaluation results show that it has an average identification accuracy of over 97% for 1-3 targets (5 cm * 10 cm in size) with different materials randomly placed within a 1.05 m * 1.05 m area.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Anteumbler: Non-Invasive Antenna Orientation Error Measurement for WiFi APs

The performance of WiFi-based localization systems is affected by the spatial accuracy of WiFi AP. Compared with the imprecision of AP location and antenna separation, the imprecision of AP's or antenna's orientation is more important in real scenarios, including AP rotation and antenna irregular tilt. In this paper, we propose Anteumbler that non-invasively, accurately and efficiently measures the orientation of each antenna in physical space. Based on the fact that the received power is maximized when a Tx-Rx antenna pair is perfectly aligned, we construct a spatial angle model that can obtain the antennas' orientations without prior knowledge. However, the sampling points of traversing the spatial angle need to cover the entire space. We use the orthogonality of antenna directivity and polarization and adopt an iterative algorithm to reduce the sampling points by hundreds of times, which greatly improves the efficiency. To achieve the required antenna orientation accuracy, we eliminate the influence of propagation distance using a dual plane intersection model and filter out ambient noise. Our real-world experiments with six antenna types, two antenna layouts and two antenna separations show that Anteumbler achieves median errors below 6 degree for both elevation and azimuth angles, and is robust to NLoS and dynamic environments. Last but not least, for the reverse localization system, we deploy Anteumbler over LocAP and reduce the antenna separation error by 10 mm, while for the user localization system, we deploy Anteumbler over SpotFi and reduce the user localization error by more than 1 m.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

Measuring Discrete Sensing Capability for ISAC via Task Mutual Information

6G technology offers a broader range of possibilities for communication systems to perform ubiquitous sensing tasks, including health monitoring, object recognition, and autonomous driving. Since even minor environmental changes can significantly degrade system performance, and conducting long-term posterior experimental evaluations in all scenarios is often infeasible, it is crucial to perform a priori performance assessments to design robust and reliable systems. In this paper, we consider a discrete ubiquitous sensing system where the sensing target has $m$ different states $W$, which can be characterized by $n$-dimensional independent features $X^n$. This model not only provides the possibility of optimizing the sensing systems at a finer granularity and balancing communication and sensing resources, but also provides theoretical explanations for classical intuitive feelings (like more modalities and more accuracy) in wireless sensing. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed channel model through real-case studies, including person identification, displacement detection, direction estimation, and device recognition. The evaluation results indicate a Pearson correlation coefficient exceeding 0.9 between our task mutual information and conventional experimental metrics (e.g., accuracy). The open source address of the code is: https://github.com/zaoanhh/DTMI

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

BuildSenSys: Reusing Building Sensing Data for Traffic Prediction with Cross-domain Learning

With the rapid development of smart cities, smart buildings are generating a massive amount of building sensing data by the equipped sensors. Indeed, building sensing data provides a promising way to enrich a series of data-demanding and cost-expensive urban mobile applications. In this paper, we study how to reuse building sensing data to predict traffic volume on nearby roads. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to achieve accurate prediction on such cross-domain data with two major challenges. First, relationships between building sensing data and traffic data are not unknown as prior, and the spatio-temporal complexities impose more difficulties to uncover the underlying reasons behind the above relationships. Second, it is even more daunting to accurately predict traffic volume with dynamic building-traffic correlations, which are cross-domain, non-linear, and time-varying. To address the above challenges, we design and implement BuildSenSys, a first-of-its-kind system for nearby traffic volume prediction by reusing building sensing data. First, we conduct a comprehensive building-traffic analysis based on multi-source datasets, disclosing how and why building sensing data is correlated with nearby traffic volume. Second, we propose a novel recurrent neural network for traffic volume prediction based on cross-domain learning with two attention mechanisms. Specifically, a cross-domain attention mechanism captures the building-traffic correlations and adaptively extracts the most relevant building sensing data at each predicting step. Then, a temporal attention mechanism is employed to model the temporal dependencies of data across historical time intervals. The extensive experimental studies demonstrate that BuildSenSys outperforms all baseline methods with up to 65.3% accuracy improvement (e.g., 2.2% MAPE) in predicting nearby traffic volume.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

GuardRider: Towards Sustainable Backscattering System over WiFi in the Wild

The WiFi backscatter communications offer ultra-low power and ubiquitous connections for IoT systems. Caused by the intermittent-nature of the WiFi traffics, state-of-the-art WiFi backscatter communications are not reliable for backscatter link or simple for tag to do adaptive transmission. In order to build sustainable (reliable and simple) WiFi backscatter communications, we present GuardRider, a WiFi backscatter system that enables backscatter communications riding on WiFi signals in the wild. The key contribution of GuardRider is an optimization algorithm of designing RS codes to follow the statistical knowledge of WiFi traffics and adjust backscatter transmission. With GuardRider, the reliable baskscatter link is guaranteed and a backscatter tag is able to adaptively transmit information without heavily listening the excitation channel. We built a hardware prototype of GuardRider using a customized tag with FPGA implementation. Both the simulations and field experiments verify that GuardRider could achieve a notably gains in bit error rate and frame error rate, which are hundredfold reduction in simulations and around 99% in filed experiments.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

COOK: Chirp-OOK Communication with Self-reliant Bitrate Adaptation in Backscatter Networks

For large-scale Internet of Things (IoT), backscatter communication is a promising technology to reduce power consumption and simplify deployment. However, backscatter communication lacks stability, along with limited communication range within a few meters. Due to the limited computation ability of backscatter tags, it is burdensome to effectively adapt the bitrate for the time-varying channel. Thus, backscatter tags are failed to fully utilize the optimal transmission rate. In this paper, we design a system named COOK with self-reliant bitrate adaptation in backscatter communication. Channel symmetry allows backscatter tags to adjust bitrate depending on the received signal strength of the excitation source (ES) without feedback. In addition, the chirp spreading signal is exploited as the ES signal to enable backscatter tags to work under noise floor. Our modulation approach is denoted as Chirp-OOK since the tags reflect the chirp signal by employing the on-off keying modulation. It allows that receiver can decode under the noise floor and the bitrate varies flexibly as the communication range changes. We have implemented the prototype system based on the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) platform. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Our system provides valid communication distance up to $27m$, which is 7 times as compared with normal backscatter system. The system significantly increases the backscatter communication stability, by supporting bitrate adaptation ranges from 0.33kbps to 1.2Mbps, and guaranteeing the bit error rate (BER) is below 1%.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Deadline-Driven Multi-node Mobile Charging

Due to the merit without requiring charging cable, wireless power transfer technologies have drawn rising attention as a new method to replenish energy to Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). In this paper, we study mobile charger scheduling problem for multi-node recharging with deadline-series. Our target is to maximize the overall effective charging utility, and minimize the traveling time as well. Instead of charging only once over a scheduling cycle, we incorporate the multiple charging strategy for multi-node charging with deadline constraint, where charging spots and tour are jointly optimized. Specifically, we formulate the effective charging utility maximization problem as to maximize a monotone submodular function subject to a partition matroid constraint, and propose a simple but effective 1/2 -approximation greedy algorithm. After that, we present the grid-based skip-substitute operation further to save the traveling time, which can increase the charging utility. Finally, we conduct the evaluation for the performance of our scheduling scheme. Comparing to the Early Deadline First scheme, the simulation and field experiment results show that our algorithm outperform EDF by 37.5% and 37.9%, respectively.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

Wi-Motion: A Robust Human Activity Recognition Using WiFi Signals

Recent research has shown that human motions and positions can be recognized through WiFi signals. The key intuition is that different motions and positions introduce different multi-path distortions in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time-series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose Wi-Motion, a WiFi-based human activities recognition system. Unlike existing systems, Wi-Motion adopts the amplitude and phase information extracted from the CSI sequence to construct the classifiers respectively, and combines the results using a combination strategy based on posterior probability. As the simulation results shows, Wi-Motion can recognize six human activities with the mean accuracy of 98:4%.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

On Measurement of the Spatio-Frequency Property of OFDM Backscattering

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) backscatter system, such as Wi-Fi backscatter, has recently been recognized as a promising technique for the IoT connectivity, due to its ubiquitous and low-cost property. This paper investigates the spatial-frequency property of the OFDM backscatter which takes the distance and the angle into account in different frequency bands. We deploy three typical scenarios for performing measurements to evaluate the received signal strength from the backscatter link. The impact of the distances among the transmitter, the tag and the receiver, as well as the angle between the transmitter and the tag is observed through the obtained measurement data. From the evaluation results, it is found that the best location of tag is either close to the receiver or the transmitter which depends on the frequency band, and the best angle is 90 degrees between the transmitter and the receiver. This work opens the shed light on the spatial deployment of the backscatter tag in different frequency band with the aim of improving the performance and reducing the interference.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

From Communication to Sensing : Recognizing and Counting Repetitive Motions with Wireless Backscattering

Recently several ground-breaking RF-based motion recognition systems were proposed to detect and/or recognize macro/micro human movements. These systems often suffer from various interferences caused by multiple-users moving simultaneously, resulting in extremely low recognition accuracy. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel system, called Motion-Fi, which marries battery free wireless backscattering and device-free sensing. Motion-Fi is an accurate, interference tolerable motion-recognition system, which counts repetitive motions without using scenario-dependent templates or profiles and enables multi-users performing certain motions simultaneously because of the relatively short transmission range of backscattered signals. Although the repetitive motions are fairly well detectable through the backscattering signals in theory, in reality they get blended into various other system noises during the motion. Moreover, irregular motion patterns among users will lead to expensive computation cost for motion recognition. We build a backscattering wireless platform to validate our design in various scenarios for over 6 months when different persons, distances and orientations are incorporated. In our experiments, the periodicity in motions could be recognized without any learning or training process, and the accuracy of counting such motions can be achieved within 5% count error. With little efforts in learning the patterns, our method could achieve 93.1% motion-recognition accuracy for a variety of motions. Moreover, by leveraging the periodicity of motions, the recognition accuracy could be further improved to nearly 100% with only 3 repetitions. Our experiments also show that the motions of multiple persons separating by around 2 meters cause little accuracy reduction in the counting process.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2015

WalkieLokie: Relative Positioning for Augmented Reality Using a Dummy Acoustic Speaker

We propose and implement a novel relative positioning system, WalkieLokie, to enable more kinds of Augmented Reality applications, e.g., virtual shopping guide, virtual business card sharing. WalkieLokie calculates the distance and direction between an inquiring user and the corresponding target. It only requires a dummy speaker binding to the target and broadcasting inaudible acoustic signals. Then the user walking around can obtain the position using a smart device. The key insight is that when a user walks, the distance between the smart device and the speaker changes; and the pattern of displacement (variance of distance) corresponds to the relative position. We use a second-order phase locked loop to track the displacement and further estimate the position. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of our strategy, we propose a synchronization mechanism to synthesize all estimation results from different timeslots. We show that the mean error of ranging and direction estimation is 0.63m and 2.46 degrees respectively, which is accurate even in case of virtual business card sharing. Furthermore, in the shopping mall where the environment is quite severe, we still achieve high accuracy of positioning one dummy speaker, and the mean position error is 1.28m.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2015

A Visible Light Based Indoor Positioning System

In this paper, we propose a novel indoor localization scheme that exploits ubiquitous visible lights, which are necessarily and densely deployed in almost all indoor environments. We unveil two phenomena of lights available for positioning: 1) the light strength varies according to different light sources, which can be easily detected by light sensors embedded in COTS devices (e.g., smart-phone, smart-glass and smart-watch); 2) the light strength is stable in different times of the day thus exploiting it can avoid frequent site-survey and database maintenance. Hence, a user could locate oneself by differentiating the light source of received light strength (RLS). However, different from existing positioning systems that exploit special LEDs, ubiquitous visible lights lack fingerprints that can uniquely identify the light source, which results in an ambiguity problem that an RLS may correspond to multiple positions. Moreover, RLS is not only determined by device's position, but also seriously affected by its orientation, which causes great complexity in site-survey. To address these challenges, we first propose and validate a realistic light strength model that can attributes RLS to arbitrary positions with heterogenous orientations. This model is further perfected by taking account of the device diversity, influence of multiple light sources and shading of obstacles. Then we design a localizing scheme that harness user's mobility to generate spatial-related RLS to tackle the position-ambiguity problem of a single RLS, which is robust against sunlight interference, shading effect of human-body and unpredictable behaviours (e.g., put the device in pocket) of user. Experiment results show that our scheme achieves mean accuracy $1.93$m and $1.98$m in office ($720m^2$) and library scenario ($960m^2$) respectively.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2014

Low-Complexity Cloud Image Privacy Protection via Matrix Perturbation

Cloud-assisted image services are widely used for various applications. Due to the high computational complexity of existing image encryption technology, it is extremely challenging to provide privacy preserving image services for resource-constrained smart device. In this paper, we propose a novel encrypressive cloud-assisted image service scheme, called eCIS. The key idea of eCIS is to shift the high computational cost to the cloud allowing reduction in complexity of encoder and decoder on resource-constrained device. This is done via compressive sensing (CS) techniques, compared with existing approaches, we are able to achieve privacy protection at no additional transmission cost. In particular, we design an encryption matrix by taking care of image compression and encryption simultaneously. Such that, the goal of our design is to minimize the mutual information of original image and encrypted image. In addition to the theoretical analysis that demonstrates the security properties and complexity of our system, we also conduct extensive experiment to evaluate its performance. The experiment results show that eCIS can effectively protect image privacy and meet the user's adaptive secure demand. eCIS reduced the system overheads by up to $4.1\times\sim6.8\times$ compared with the existing CS based image processing approach.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2013

Accurate Indoor Localization Using Acoustic Direction Finding via Smart Phones

We propose and implement a novel indoor localization scheme, Swadloon, built upon an accurate acoustic direction finding. Swadloon leverages sensors of the smartphone without the requirement of any specialized devices. The scheme Swadloon does not rely on any fingerprints and is very easy to use: a user only needs to shake the phone for a short duration before walking and localization. Our Swadloon design exploits a key observation: the relative shift and velocity of the phone-shaking movement corresponds to the subtle phase and frequency shift of the Doppler effects experienced in the received acoustic signal by the phone. A novel method is designed to derive the direction from the phone to the acoustic source by combining the velocity calculated from the subtle Doppler shift with the one from the inertial sensors of the phone. Then a real-time precise localization and tracking is enabled by using a few anchor speakers with known locations. Major challenges in implementing Swadloon are to measure the frequency shift precisely and to estimate the shaking velocity accurately when the speed of phone-shaking is low and changes arbitrarily. We propose rigorous methods to address these challenges, then design and deploy Swadloon in several floors of an indoor building each with area about 2000m^2. Our extensive experiments show that the mean error of direction finding is around 2.1 degree when the acoustic source is within the range of 32m. For indoor localization, the 90-percentile errors are under 0.92m, while the maximum error is 1.73m and the mean is about 0.5m. For real-time tracking, the errors are within 0.4m for walks of 51m.

cs.NI↗