A research group in MIT develop the tech called “RF-C Capture”, a system that captures the human figure – i.e., a coarse skeleton – through a wall.
RF-Capture cantracks the 3D positions of a person’s limbs and body parts, even when the person is fully invisible to sensor. What’s more, it does not need to put any mark or signal projector on the subject’ body.
In designing RF-Capture, They built on recent advances in wireless research, which have shown that certain radio frequency (RF) signals can traverse walls and re- flect off the human body, allowing for the detection of human mo- tion through walls. In contrast to these past systems which abstract the entire human body as a single point and find the overall location of that point through walls, it can reconstruct var- ious human body parts and stitch them together to capture the hu- man figure. We built a prototype of RF-Capture and tested it on 15 subjects. Their results show that the system can capture a represen- tative human figure through walls and use it to distinguish between various users.
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Related Work
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Motion Capture Systems
Past work for capturing the human skeleton relied on motion capture systems that either require in- strumenting the human body with markers or operate only in di-
rect line-of-sight to the human body. -
Imaging and Reconstruction Algorithms
RF-Capture is related to past work on imaging hidden shapes using light that bounces off corner reflectors in the scene [Velten et al. 2012; Kirmani et al. 2009; Heide et al. 2014]. These past systems operate by estimat- ing the time-of-flight of the object’s reflections bouncing off the corner. -
Radar Systems
Radar systems were the first to use RF reflections to detect and track objects. The vast majority of the radar litera- ture focuses on inanimate objects (e.g., planes, metallic structures), as opposed to humans. The radar literature that deals with human subjects can be classified into two categories.
Although the idealistic assumption and currant method make the system some imperfect, but obviously it will be a technology that benefits a lot to the future life.