NotiFi: a ubiquitous WiFi-based abnormal activity detection system

We build an ubiquitous abnormal activity detection system, namely NotiFi, for accurately detecting the abnormal activities on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) IEEE 802.11 devices. In contrast to the traditional wearable sensor based and computer vision based systems which require additional sensors or enough lighting in line-of-sight (LoS) scenario, we proceed directly with abnormal activity characterization and activity modeling at the WiFi signal level based on Channel State Information (CSI). The intuition of NotiFi is that whenever the human body occludes the wireless signal transmitting from the access point to the receiver, the phase and the amplitude information of Channel State Information (CSI) will change sensitively. By creating a multiple hierarchical Dirichlet processes, NotiFi automatically learns the number of human body activity categories for abnormal detection. Experimental results in three typical indoor environments indicate that NotiFi can achieve satisfactory performance in accuracy, robustness and stability.