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WiFi Routers Used to Produce 3D Images of Humans
- captainkrtek 4y agoPretty cool. Semi-related but reminds me of this research from MIT on seeing around corners: https://youtu.be/JWDocXPy-iQ https://youtu.be/JWDocXPy-iQ
- varenc 4y agoWow that video was short, informative, and very cool in a retro sort of way. Thanks.
- 404mm 4y agoYes! And seeing through a keyhole! https://youtu.be/Veo27qhrI20 https://youtu.be/Veo27qhrI20
- birdyrooster 4y agoI spend so much time thinking about this as an entrepreneur and whenever I talk use cases people seem to not care.
- themaninthedark 4y agoWe have radar capable satellites we use to bounce a signal off the ground, through a hanger door and then reconstruct the image to discern what is hidden there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztR9mdJ1YWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztR9mdJ1YWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2bUKEi9It4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2bUKEi9It4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOoCltqtJR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOoCltqtJR8
- giantg2 4y agoThey can also do this without the laser by detecting shadows from existing light sources that aren't visible to the naked eye.
- thewebcount 4y ago[flagged]
- fy20 4y agoI read "used to" in the title in the past tense form. For a moment I was wondering why they no longer produce 3D images.
- vlovich123 4y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLAe3RyMDk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLAe3RyMDk
- mabbo 4y agoI came here to bring the exact same joke. Rest in peace, Mitch.
- brycedriesenga 4y agoThe code was lost eons ago, sadly :'(
- userbinator 4y agoMe too. I'd expect "Using WiFi Routers to Produce 3D Images of Humans" if it were present tense.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoDid Lucius Fox resign or re-sign?
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThis is why I put tape over my Wi-Fi router
- WithinReason 4y agoI guess wearing a tin foil hat might be useful too
- slimsag 4y agoReally putting the router in an aluminum enclosure/Faraday cage if you can is the only way to prevent this. Then just use the lan ports on the device, but also make sure the LAN cables are shielded because it could be using them as antennas given how compromised wifi router firmwares usually are.
- LarryMullins 4y agoYou have to shield your home from your neighbor's emitters too. And from the police radar surveillance van sitting in the street in front of your house.
- rl3 4y ago>... And from the police radar surveillance van sitting in the street in front of your house. Nothing a kind note and an order of small-batch artisan donuts can't solve.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoAnd space lasers.
- wizeman 4y ago> You have to shield your home from your neighbor's emitters too. And from the police radar surveillance van sitting in the street in front of your house. That's what tin foil houses are for, obviously.
- bubblehack3r 4y agoLink directly to the research paper: https://vpnoverview.com/wp-content/uploads/2301.00250.pdf https://vpnoverview.com/wp-content/uploads/2301.00250.pdf
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tecleandor 4y agoSeems like they've remove the PDF from the article. You can get the original PDF from Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deno 4y agoThe photo in article is some random stock image and has nothing to do with the research paper[1]. [1] https://vpnoverview.com/wp-content/uploads/2301.00250.pdf https://vpnoverview.com/wp-content/uploads/2301.00250.pdf
- lynndotpy 4y agoOh wow. Notably, Figures 7 and 8 (on pages 7 and 10, respectively) are better resolved than the stock photo. Figure 8 shows a variety of "failure cases," but even these failure cases are surprisingly accurate estimations!
- blincoln 4y agoIf I understand the captions correctly, the wireframe images overlaid on RGB images are from the algorithm run on the RGB images, not the wifi data, so having them match up is not surprising. The standalone wireframe images sometimes manage to get the number of people and their approximate positions correct, but everything else about them seems (IMO) believable but not necessarily accurate, like most AI output. This doesn't surprise me, because the input data is very coarse. Look at their graphs. There's just not enough raw data there to accurately reconstruct much other than position in the room. I'm sure it's possible to do more accurate recording and reconstruction, I just don't think this demonstrates it.
- ghostpepper 4y agoIs that link broken for anyone else? Redirects back to the top level page for me
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thedrexster 4y agoTry https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00250.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00250.pdf -- looks like they removed the original PDF from the linked article.
- deleted 4y ago
- yazzku 4y ago> In addition, they protect individuals’ privacy and the required equipment can be bought at a reasonable price. To argue that this protects people's privacy (versus cameras in public spaces) is certainly a very odd take. I'd be more curious to know what are legitimate use cases of this and who funded the research.
- LarryMullins 4y agoIt's kind of like the way they renamed the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
- Ultimatt 4y ago"WiFi Routers Estimates 3D Pose of Humans in Modelled Reconstruction" as an actual non bullshit title. The paper being a more concise "DensePose from WiFi".
- transpute 4y ago> This proof-of-concept would be a breakthrough for healthcare, security, gaming (VR), and a host of other industries. Similar capability is scheduled for new consumer routers in 2024 via Wi-Fi 7 Sensing / IEEE 802.11bf. Hundreds of previous papers include terms like these: human-to-human interaction recognition device-free human activity recognition occupant activity recognition in smart offices emotion sensing via wireless channel data CSI learning for gait biometric sensing sleep monitoring from afar human breath status via commodity wifi device-free crowd sensing Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423395 Sample code exists for ESP32 WROOM, https://wrlab.github.io/Wi-ESP/ https://wrlab.github.io/Wi-ESP/ and Intel 5300, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/ https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/
- avree 4y agoEven pre-WiFi 7, there are companies such as Cognitive who allow you to detect motion (as well as occupant activity, etc.). I implemented such a system at my previous company which sold Wi-Fi.
- transpute 4y agoYes, some vendors have shipped their own implementations. There's also custom firmware for some radios. But standardization will bring scale and ubiquity to non-technical users. Are millions of city occupants ready for transparent walls, floors and ceilings? Are businesses ready for remote keystroke detection?
- Gigachad 4y agoI guess the future is RF blocking walls. Might even be a good thing since It'll allow for less congested airwaves for yourself.
- transpute 4y agoMaybe something like this foil-backed gypsum board, https://www.goldbondbuilding.com/products/drywall-panels/foil-back-gypsum-board https://www.goldbondbuilding.com/products/drywall-panels/foi... RF/sound blocking drywall for SCIFs costs a small fortune, https://www.quietrock.com/products/quietrock-530rf https://www.quietrock.com/products/quietrock-530rf EMF shielding case study, https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html
- nly 4y agoCan we use this sort of processing power and analysis to figure out how to get better signal coverage in a property instead?
- bastardoperator 4y agoAre you interested in joining our human mesh network? For the price of 420.69 we offer a wearable necklace with a raspberry pi attached to it and a green solar panel t-shirt to ensure power/uptime. Become the internet now! Restriction may apply, sorry not available in Hawaii or Alaska.
- mr-pink 4y agoi'd like to understand wtf my upstairs neighbor is doing. can this help me?
- hungryforcodes 4y agoIs she hot? If so, then maybe when she complains to the police about you (or whoever) a sudden negative land slide against this sort of technology will ensure.
- chedca21 4y ago[dead]
- steele 4y agoYet another reason to avoid Xfinity hardware.
- can16358p 4y agoThe more unexpected discoveries we find, the more I think how many more capabilities of everyday devices are "hiding" in plainsight that would surprise us.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoI would really like to see a practical open source implementation of this so people can start looking for ways to defeat it. Otherwise you know the police are going to abuse this.
- LarryMullins 4y agoShort of lining your walls with foil, how could you defeat it legally? Jamming isn't legal. We need new legislation to ban this, without a law enforcement exemption. I don't have high hopes.
- giantg2 4y agoI would take a wild guess that it wouldn't be jamming, but some sort of network configuration. Maybe something like extra access points with specific geometry, higher power exterior APs than interior APs, or random beam forming or reflections. Jamming could still be an option. Most devices are required to accept any interference from other lawful devices. So in theory, you could find legal ways of jamming. https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-jam-your-neighbors-wi-fi-legally/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-jam-your-neighbors-wi-f...
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoThe same law that says you must accept interference also says you may not cause interference, or something like that. You could only legally jam by making transmissions that are actually useful and just happen to also interfere. IANAL.
- iam-TJ 4y ago"Jamming" is legal in as much as any device that operates in the ISM[0] bands must accept interference - so in the 2.4GHz example, microwave ovens, baby monitors, TV relays, remote door monitors, wireless alarm systems etc., all operate in the same band and will interfere with WiFi that is close by (since they use a different modulation). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band
- HeckFeck 4y agoIt wouldn't surprise me if the three letter agencies were already utilising this.
- t433 4y ago[flagged]
- ben_w 4y agoI doubt it. If they want to see you though a wall, they will use an overpriced custom radar solution, not consumer electronics with COTS software.
- post-it 4y agoBut the consumer electronics are already in position.
- Gustomaximus 4y agoBoth have an application. This can be employed at bulk. Say for example they still wanted to find bin laden, they can do a mass look for people 6ft 4 type search which would narrow things down significantly. Then have a more detailed look with custom radar or other of worth while. Maybe a poor off the cuff example but that kinda of bulk information collection.
- olivierlacan 4y agoYou may be working with people who, at the beginning of their careers, worked on exciting and challenging projects as junior engineers for U.S. defense contractors to either detect the precise location of specific Wi-Fi clients. Ask them when they realized that their work was extensible to any radio frequency client (cell, Bluetooth) and used for targetting missile strikes. I can guarantee you know at least a few people in the industry who did. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. This story reeks of DoD funded research which somehow gets whitewashed as "cool new tech thing!" on tech blogs when it should really be sending chills down your collective spines. This capability may be fringe and nation-state controlled for a few years, then it will inevitably fall into the hands of large and well-funded criminal organizations, abusive spouses, and of course overfunded trigger happy SWAT teams — who will still manage to get their court order addresses wrong and kill innocent people and pets over a no-knock warrant. All this triggers in me is the irrespressible urge to get technologists to finally get it through their thick skulls that what we do does kill people exactly like doctors. We've just refuse to take responsibility for it when any other industry would have seriously discussed ethics board and licensure at this point. No matter how complicated such an effort would be.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- golergka 4y ago> their work was extensible to any radio frequency client (cell, Bluetooth) and used for targetting missile strikes Good. I didn't work on such tech, but I would be excited and proud to, if I was working for a country like US, which I believe in.
- nigerian1981 4y agoProud of the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by the US?
- akimball 4y agoI think you lowballed that by a factor of 10
- jeffbee 4y ago"Meat interferes with photons" must be among the least-surprising research outcomes of all time.
- hypefi 4y agoyet, people still discard the idea that EMFs can have health effects ??
- anigbrowl 4y agoThis proof-of-concept would be a breakthrough for healthcare, security, gaming (VR), and a host of other industries. /facepalm They do acknowledge the privacy concerns but go to make (imho) pie-in-the-sky arguments like 'this will enhance privacy because security cameras won't be as necessary in public spaces. Journalism doesn't pay much, so maybe this is some naively idealistic person's first writing job. I once believed that adding public comments on news websites would elevate the standard of public discourse and I mentally kick myself on the regular for the time I spent promoting this idea back in the 1990s. The researchers offering the same ideas in the paper don't have such an excuse; they're creating an entire new class of surveillance technology and pretending that this will somehow enhance privacy, which flies in the face of all experience and research on the topic. The technicals result are outstanding and I'm very impressed by them, as well as the exposition and direction of research. The potential applications are numerous and exciting to my inner geek. But I'm also worried. The existing limitations will fall sooner than expected, and it will be productized while the ethicists are still drafting their arguments (at which point they'll shift to asking for donations to counter the latest threat). Semi-seriously considering repainting the inside of my house to make a faraday cage by mixing copper paint in the underlayer.
- transpute 4y ago> Semi-seriously considering repainting the inside of my house to make a faraday cage by mixing copper paint in the underlayer. EMF reduction case study with conductive paint, https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html
- azinman2 4y agoThe thing is, almost all technology is a double edged sword. That doesn’t do much to alleviate the responsibility of those who do it to understand the ethics of the world, but usually that’s beyond our ability. I’m sure few working on consumer drones in the beginning anticipated their use on the battle field. The internet itself is a great example of how much benefit can come from access to knowledge, as well as the ability to how limitless (mis)knowledge can be simultaneously used to destroy societies. Ultimately bad actors will do bad things regardless with whatever they have access to. Of course new bad things can come along, but what metric should we use to decide whether an idea is worth perusing? Who should make the cost benefit analysis, when the reality 20 years down the road is often unknowable (bad and good)?
- version_five 4y agoA variation of this was used in "The Dark Knight", and you'll recall that Morgan Freeman quit (ok or maybe threatened to quit per the comment below, we know he was back in The Dark Knight Rises) over the ethical implications.
- karlzt 4y ago*Knight
- version_five 4y agoHaha right I don't know if that was autocorrect or just me zoning out. Probably the ladder
- dogcomplex 4y ago*Latter
- dinobones 4y ago“It’s sonar… Like a,” “Like a submarine, Mr. Wayne.”
- capableweb 4y agoI've never seen the movie, but was curious about it regardless. This is what I found about it, maybe others are as clueless about it as me: > Fox [Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman] eventually learned that Bruce [Batman] had expanded on sonar technology and developed an advanced surveillance system that could listen in and track the movement of any of the thousands of cell phones in Gotham, but, to ensure that the system was not misused, Bruce designed it so that only Fox could control it. Since that essentially contradicted everything that Bruce believed in, Fox agreed to help but said that he would resign if the machine was not destroyed after The Joker was defeated and captured. After the Joker was apprehended, Fox entered a code (his own name) as instructed by Bruce, which activated a self-destruct function for the system, and Fox continued to work under Bruce. From https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Lucius_Fox_(Nolanverse)#The_Dark_Knight https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Lucius_Fox_(Nolanverse)#The_D... Seems he never actually quit, but was fine pushing his own ethical concerns aside for a little while, and continued working with Batman afterwards.
- smeej 4y agoDDGing "Faraday wallpaper"...
- toby- 4y agoIs there a better source than a random VPN comparison website that exists to promote affiliate links?
- makeva 4y agoYay for connected fridge reselling your data /s
- eximius 4y agoIs anyone aware of any open source tools for this kind of thing?
- transpute 4y agoTwo github repos linked in this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482094
- rdevsrex 4y agoThis sounds like something the military should already have figured out.
- snake_doc 4y agoPretty similar to an older Nature paper, using smart speakers to monitor heart rate. Wang, A., Nguyen, D., Sridhar, A.R. et al. Using smart speakers to contactlessly monitor heart rhythms. Commun Biol 4, 319 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01824-9 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01824-9
- OhioMan2943 4y agoIs this the paper where they try and detect "emotional states" from heart rate and motion with moderate success? I could imagine this technology being deployed in public spaces in autocratic/repressive countries to screen for citizens who seem to be feeling hostile or angry.
- tshaddox 4y agoMIT CSAIL had an extremely similar project way back in 2015: http://rfcapture.csail.mit.edu/ http://rfcapture.csail.mit.edu/
- xena 4y agoI would love to use this for full body tracking in VR
- sedivy94 4y agoI remember seeing a similar study years back… the claim was tracking of positions of bodies. The mechanism reminded me of Project Soli, using signal processing to make 2D/3D inferences. This sounds like the next iteration on that finding. Wild.
- Bloating 4y agoI used to get excited about the benefical uses of new tech. Now, I'm expecting to be charged 19.95 subscription (for data that should never and doesn't really need to leave the LAN) for the privliege of amazon tracking my movements so they know when to send TP JIT. Thank you guys
- pavelstoev 4y agoWe have done the same and published back in early 2020. THis paper does reference our work as [11]. Blog post with our human detection video here (eerie !): https://futurebnd.com/human-detection-classification-and-visualization-using-wi-fi/ https://futurebnd.com/human-detection-classification-and-vis... and the paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05842.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05842.pdf
- ct520 4y agoCan see it already. Sounds like a breakthrough in urban warfare. Swarm of drones flying around mapping enemy positions live like a video game. Scary
- patientplatypus 4y ago[dead]
- mzakharo1 4y agoThe paper trains a model that a. requires training data in a specific environment. Meaning, to deploy this tech, you need access to the space first to train this model. b. once trained, will not transfer its knowledge if routers are moved, or setup is deployed in a new area. c. training was done with just a single person moving. multiple people moving was not evaluated by this tech/probably harder to achieve. With that in mind, I think privacy-invasion capability of this technology is exaggerated by some comments here.
- transpute 4y agoThis specific paper is only one of several hundred papers from a decade of research leading to IEEE standardization, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external From a 2021 paper on IEEE 802.11bf Wi-Fi Sensing, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf > Indeed, it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking ... since Wi- Fi signals can penetrate hard objects and can be used without the presence of light, end-users may not even realize they are being tracked .. individuals should be provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services – to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-Fi devices around them. This would require the widespread introduction of reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification. 200 comments on privacy vs. utility, Jan 2022, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- rogers18445 4y agoThere are scenarios where you can record data first, and then train with later access to the space. Then process recorded data.
- mschuster91 4y ago> Meaning, to deploy this tech, you need access to the space first to train this model. Government secret services have gone and re-built the houses of high-profile raid targets before. And it's only a matter of time until simulation technology becomes powerful enough to do a "good enough" digital recreation from blueprints. > multiple people moving was not evaluated by this tech/probably harder to achieve At least one scenario in the article mentions "a room with several people". People moving around is just a question of speeding up data collection and analysis. > With that in mind, I think privacy-invasion capability of this technology is exaggerated by some comments here. The key thing is, what is public research grade now, is likely already a developed asset in government toolkits. And now that the general public has access to such technology, it will - more likely than not, given it can be done on 50$ low-cost devices - be commoditized, particularly where there is a financial interest in tracking people. I think a good candidate will be supermarkets and similar stores - at least in Europe, stuff like running analytics on surveillance cameras is pretty frowned upon under GDPR, but something like wifi-based tracking should be relatively unproblematic.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago> This proof-of-concept would be a breakthrough for healthcare, security, gaming (VR), and a host of other industries. They forgot the panopticon and Big Brother. Big breakthrough here as well! Enjoy the week people, funky times ahead :)
- stuckkeys 4y agoI have to remember not to walk naked around my Wi-Fi
- Animats 4y agoIs there something low-cost and purpose-built to do this at short range, for when you just want to do some body tracking for VR/metaverse stuff? The trouble with doing this with a webcam is that occlusion results in errors and the avatar's limbs jump around. This sort of RF thing has more field of view, too.
- transpute 4y agoThis MS/Stanford project looks relevant, https://web.stanford.edu/~mkotaru/wicapture https://web.stanford.edu/~mkotaru/wicapture & https://www.science.org/content/article/wi-fi-could-protect-you-getting-lost-virtual-reality https://www.science.org/content/article/wi-fi-could-protect-... Commercially, Plume has 200K early adopters of Wi-Fi Sensing for human presence, but not VR specific, https://www.protocol.com/plume-wifi-data-intelligence https://www.protocol.com/plume-wifi-data-intelligence > Plume began testing Wi-Fi motion detection technology developed by Cognitive Systems in early 2020, and the company is now considering offering additional services atop of that technology. These could include triggers that help consumers save energy by automatically turning off lights after someone leaves a room, or even provide security and elder care products. Amazon Echo uses ultrasound for motion detection.
- Animats 4y ago> This MS/Stanford project looks relevant, That's not imaging, that's tracking a WiFi equipped target. That's pretty standard now. Sony's Mocopi is probably the most elegant implementation.[1] Tundra Tracker [2] also gets good reviews. Motion detection is much lower rez. Ultrasound is like trying to sense the world with a probe the size of a broom. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovHHpralCD8&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovHHpralCD8&t=3s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImEKHrUp4QM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImEKHrUp4QM
- transpute 4y agoThis one tracks limbs, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447993.3482857 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447993.3482857 & https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-winect-tracks-3d-human-poses.html https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-winect-tracks-3d-human-p... > Our system tracks free-form activity by estimating a 3D skeleton pose that consists of a set of joints of the human body. In particular, Winect first identifies the moving limbs by leveraging the signals reflected off the human body and separates the entangled signals for each limb. Then, our system tracks each limb and constructs a 3D skeleton of the body by modeling the inherent relationship between the movements of the limb and the corresponding joints. Our evaluation results show that Winect achieves centimeter-level accuracy for free-form activity tracking under various environments. ~200 papers for VR + CSI, ~30 for 2022, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=40005&sciodt=0%2C10&cites=4354757827101869878&scipsc=1&q=virtual+reality https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=40005&sciodt...
- blurbleblurble 4y agoThere's a reason the Five Eyes issued such firm caution about 5G hardware and the reason is that 5G is sensing infrastructure.
- d3vmax 4y agoUrban special ops already use some version of this.
- ivxvm 4y agoCan't wait for the day when those scientists start coming up with systems that intelligently assess whether your wifi, phone, or even just electricity wires are being hijacked by malicious actors.
- madmaniak 4y agoIt's not new as you could think after reading the article. I remember reading about this technology - seeing humans through walls basing on internal wifi signal for some US government agencies - at least 7y ago. Also OpenWRT software for routers has plugin for gestures for MANY years already. Possibilities of reading gestures by your home router implies all mentioned use cases. It's past, but written here as a future. It's truism but written as discovery. Another truism would be saying that it scales for any radio antennas - like GSM. Especially if you have dense grid.
- amaccuish 4y agoI really wish we would make more of WiFi routers, AVM with their Fritzboxes seem to be the only ones doing something interesting, with features like SIP Server, SAT>IP Server, Internet Radio etc. Routers can have attached storage, why can't we backup our phones to them instead of iCloud (instead of workarounds like Nextcloud)? Why can't they directly provide location information over a standard protocol, thus potentially avoiding a request to a cloud service?
- eth0up 4y agoSlightly related,a little dated, but relevant reminder: Rebehold, the Range-R: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range-R https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range-R https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-see-through-walls/22007615/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-...
- kderbyma 4y agoWifi was already submitted as an imaging specification...