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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Capturing the human figure through a wall

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

We present RF-Capture, a system that captures the human figure - i.e., a coarse skeleton - through a wall. RF-Capture tracks the 3D positions of a person's limbs and body parts even when the person is fully occluded from its sensor, and does so without placing any markers on the subject's body. In designing RF-Capture, we built on recent advances in wireless research, which have shown that certain radio frequency (RF) signals can traverse walls and reflect off the human body, allowing for the detection of human motion 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, we show how we can reconstruct various human body parts and stitch them together to capture the human figure. We built a prototype of RF-Capture and tested it on 15 subjects. Our results show that the system can capture a representative human figure through walls and use it to distinguish between various users.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Hsu, Chen-Yu, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Dina Katabi.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108978
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/108978

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Hsu, Chen-Yu, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Capturing the human figure through a wall. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108978