Towards Generalized mmWave-based Human Pose Estimation through Signal Augmentation

Hongfei Xue, Qiming Cao, Chenglin Miao, Yan Ju, Haochen Hu, Aidong Zhang, Lu Su

Abstract: The unprecedented advance of wireless human sensing is enabled by the proliferation of the deep learning techniques, which, however, rely heavily on the completeness and representativeness of the data patterns contained in the training set. Thus, deep learning based wireless human perception models usually fail when the human subject is conducting activities that are unseen during the model training. To address this problem, we propose a novel wireless signal augmentation framework, named mmGPE, for Generalized mmWave-based Pose Estimation. In mmGPE, we adopt a physical simulator to generate mmWave FMCW signals. However, due to the imperfect simulation of the physical world, there is a big gap between the signals generated by the physical simulator and the real-world signals collected by the mmWave radar. To tackle this challenge, we propose to integrate the physical signal simulation with deep learning techniques. Specifically, we develop a deep learning-based signal refiner in mmGPE that is capable of bridging the gap and generating realistic signal data. Through extensive evaluations on a COTS mmWave testbed, our mmGPE system demonstrates high accuracy in generating human meshes for unseen activities.