Vision Transformers for Human Activity Recognition Using WiFi Channel State Information

Wireless sensing and communication evolved separately in the past. However, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) unlocks a new era of mobile network capabilities, with WiFi emerging as a prime candidate. By leveraging existing WiFi infrastructure and frequencies, ISAC enables powerful services like accurate localization and human activity recognition (HAR). WiFi-based HAR is a prime example powered by the magic of ISAC. WiFi channel state information (CSI) is susceptible to human movement disturbances; the alterations in CSI mirror the dynamic attributes of human activities. Given the intricate relationship between human activities and CSI, numerous deep learning models have been introduced to enhance HAR accuracy. Recently, transformer-based models have achieved excellent performance in various tasks, including speech recognition, natural language processing, and image classification. This has spurred research into incorporating transformer-based models into WiFi sensing applications. However, their application in WiFi-based HAR remains nascent. Vision transformer (ViT) is well-suited for analyzing WiFi CSI signals in the form of spectra, such as the Doppler frequency spectrum frequently utilized in related studies, owing to its data structure mimicking that of images. In this study, we explored five widely used ViT architectures (vanilla ViT, SimpleViT, DeepViT, SwinTransformer, and CaiT) for WiFi CSI-based HAR using two publicly available data sets, UT-HAR and NTU-Fi HAR. Our work aims to assess and compare the performance of diverse ViT architectures for WiFi CSI-based HAR and provide guidelines for WiFi-based HAR modeling and ViT selection, considering accuracy, model size, and computational efficiency.