RDGait: A mmWave Based Gait User Recognition System for Complex Indoor Environments Using Single-chip Radar

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to study millimeter-wave-based gait recognition in complex indoor environments, focusing on dealing with multipath ghosts and supporting rapid deployment to new environments. We design a ghost detection algorithm based on velocity change patterns. This algorithm relies solely on velocity estimation, requiring no environmental priors or multipath modeling. Hence, it is suitable for single-chip millimeter-wave radar with low angular resolution and can be conveniently deployed in new indoor settings. In addition, we build a gait recognition network based on an attention-based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to extract spatiotemporal-velocity features from RD heatmaps. We have evaluated RDGait in two scenarios: a corridor scenario and a crowded office scenario, with 125 volunteers of different genders and ages ranging from 6 to 63. RDGait achieves a user recognition accuracy exceeding 95% among 125 candidates in both scenarios. We have further deployed RDGait in two additional scenarios using the pretrain-finetune approach. With minimal user registration data, RDGait could achieve satisfactory (> 90%) recognition accuracy in these new environments considering different radar placements, heights, and number of co-existing users.