WALDO Finds You using Machine Learning: Wireless Adaptive Location and Detection of Objects

Abstract

We present a novel radar-based system for real-time indoor positioning and detection of objects and human-bodies with low-quality, inexpensive sensors. Using modern deep learning methods, we avoid the use of expensive hardware and computationally-expensive signal processing methods for object detection.We train our model on mini–Doppler maps, collected via software defined radios. Crucially, our system is different from existing RF-based detection systems as it operates in a less crowded frequency range of 433 MHz, allowing us to use inexpensive off-the shelf hardware. Our system, based on the VGG-16 model, reports high-accuracy results on: (1) classification of different objects/materials (plastic, glass, metal); (2) detection and classification of multiple visually and materially similar objects and the human-body; and (3) Simple object detection at different distances between the transmitter Tx and the receiver Rx.WALDO, using low frequency radio waves, is able to handle occlusions and bad lighting environments. Our results demonstrate that Deep Learning methods can be combined with inexpensive, low-frequency radars to achieve high accuracy in real-time on various useful tasks.