GrapHAR: A Lightweight Human Activity Recognition Model by Exploring the Sub-Carrier Correlations

Human activity recognition (HAR) is an important task due to its far-reaching applications, such as surveillance, healthcare systems, and human-computer interaction. Recently, Channel State Information (CSI)-based HAR has attracted increasing attention in the research community due to its ubiquitous availability, good user privacy, and fewer constraints on working conditions. Most of the existing methods for CSI-based HAR use various deep learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Transformers, to distinguish activities based on their temporal patterns. Despite their remarkable effectiveness, these methods solely focus on temporal patterns while ignoring the correlations among sub-carriers. This limitation prevents them from achieving further performance improvement. Moreover, recent works often involve advanced yet massive and inefficient neural architectures, like Transformers, to obtain satisfactory recognition accuracy. The performance gain is traded off with a steep increase in model complexity, which leads to low efficacy and high training/inference costs outsides the small time window. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight CSI-based HAR model. Our model makes the first effort to explore the graphical correlations of CSI sub-carriers, working in conjunction with a temporal causal convolution module. The high efficacy design enables our model to be highly effective without requiring excessive model complexity. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including a strong Transformer-based baseline. It achieves an average improvement of 8 percentage points in recognition accuracy, with only 10% of the parameters compared to the Transformer-based method (4.95M vs. 49.24M). Additionally, our model is significantly faster, with empirical training and execution times at least 2.07 times faster than the baseline.