Multi-Touch in the Air: Concurrent Micromovement Recognition Using RF Signals

Abstract

The human-computer interactions have moved from the conventional approaches of entering inputs into the keyboards/touchpads to the brand-new approaches of performing interactions in the air. In this paper, we propose RF-glove, a system that recognizes concurrent multiple finger micromovement using RF signals, so as to realize the vision of “multi-touch in the air.” It uses a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID reader with three antennas and five COTS tags attached to the five fingers of a glove, one tag per finger. During the process of a user performing finger micromovements, we let the RFID reader continuously interrogate these tags and obtain the backscattered RF signals from each tag. For each antenna-tag pair, the reader obtains a sequence of RF phase values called a phase profile from the tag's responses over time. To tradeoff between accuracy and robustness in terms of matching resolution, we propose a two phase approach, including coarse-grained filtering and fine-grained matching. To tackle the variation of template phase profiles at different positions, we propose a phase-model-based solution to reconstruct the template phase profiles based on the exact locations. Experiment results show that we achieve an average accuracy of 92.1% under various moving speeds, orientation deviations, and so on.