SoDar: Multitarget Gesture Recognition Based on SIMO Doppler Radar

In recent years, various intelligent activity recognition systems have been developed based on radio frequency signals such as radar, Wi-Fi, and radio frequency identification (RFID). When only one target is present, these systems can often provide high accuracy in recognizing different activities. However, such activity identification systems often fail to work due to signal interference when multiple targets coexist. To address this problem, we propose a multitarget gesture recognition system, named SoDar, based on a commercial single-input multi-output (SIMO) dual-channel Doppler radar. First, we employ endpoint detection, low-pass filtering, and discrete wavelet transform for data preprocessing. Then, we design a multitarget signal separation algorithm by maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio, and further refine the obtained signal based on principle component analysis. Afterward, we put forward a two-stage feature extraction method to extract both static and dynamic features from each separated signal. Finally, a classification model is trained to recognize the gestures of multiple targets. To verify the performance of SoDar, we selected nine different combinations of six gestures for two targets and collected more than 8000 data samples. Experimental results showed that the accuracy of two-target gesture recognition is above 90%.