RFID-Pose: Vision-Aided Three-Dimensional Human Pose Estimation With Radio-Frequency Identification

Abstract

In recent years, human pose tracking has become an important topic in computer vision (CV). To improve the privacy of human pose tracking, there is considerable interest in techniques without using a video camera. To this end, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, as a low-cost wearable sensor, provide an effective solution for 3-D human pose tracking. In this article, we propose RFID-Pose, a vision-aided realtime 3-D human pose estimation system, which is based on deep learning assisted by CV. The RFID phase data are calibrated to effectively mitigate the severe phase distortion, and high accuracy low rank tensor completion is employed to impute the missing RFID data. The system then estimates the spatial rotation angle of each human limb, and utilizes the rotation angles to reconstruct human pose in realtime with the forward kinematic technique. A prototype is developed with commodity RFID devices. High pose estimation accuracy and realtime operation of RFID-Pose are demonstrated in our experiments using Kinect 2.0 as a benchmark.