Channel State Information (CSI) Amplitude Coloring Scheme for Enhancing Accuracy of an Indoor Occupancy Detection System Using Wi-Fi Sensing

Indoor occupancy detection (IOD) via Wi-Fi sensing capitalizes on the varying patterns in CSI (Channel State Information) to estimate the number of people in a given area. However, the precision of such systems heavily depends on the quality of the CSI data, which can be degraded by noise and environmental factors. To address this issue, In this paper, we present a CSI preprocessing method to improve the accuracy of IOD systems using Wi-Fi sensing. Unlike existing preprocessing methods that use computationally complex signal processing or statistical techniques, we expand the dimension of CSI amplitude data into a three-channel vector through nonlinear transformation to amplify subtle differences between CSI data belonging to a different number of people. By drawing clearer boundaries between CSI data distributions belonging to a different number of people in a monitored area, our method improves the people-counting accuracy of a Wi-Fi sensing system. To ensure temporal consistency and improve data quality, we discretize the CSI measurements based on their transmission periods and aggregate consecutive measurements over a given time interval. These samples are then fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) specifically trained for the IOD task. Experimental results in diverse real-world scenarios verify that compared to the traditional methods, the enhanced feature representation capability of our approach leads to more accurate and robust sensing outcomes even in the most resource-constrained environment, where a commercial off-the-shelf CSI capture machine with only one antenna is used when a Wi-Fi sender with one transmit antenna sends packets periodically to the channel with the smallest Wi-Fi channel bandwidth.