ESP-PCT: Enhanced VR Semantic Performance through Efficient Compression of Temporal and Spatial Redundancies in Point Cloud Transformers

Semantic recognition is pivotal in virtual reality (VR) applications, enabling immersive and interactive experiences. A promising approach is utilizing millimeter-wave (mmWave) signals to generate point clouds. However, the high computational and memory demands of current mmWave point cloud models hinder their efficiency and reliability. To address this limitation, our paper introduces ESP-PCT, a novel Enhanced Semantic Performance Point Cloud Transformer with a two-stage semantic recognition framework tailored for VR applications. ESP-PCT takes advantage of the accuracy of sensory point cloud data and optimizes the semantic recognition process, where the localization and focus stages are trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate ESP-PCT on various VR semantic recognition conditions, demonstrating substantial enhancements in recognition efficiency. Notably, ESP-PCT achieves a remarkable accuracy of 93.2% while reducing the computational requirements (FLOPs) by 76.9% and memory usage by 78.2% compared to the existing Point Transformer model simultaneously. These underscore ESP-PCT's potential in VR semantic recognition by achieving high accuracy and reducing redundancy. The code and data of this project are available at \url{https://github.com/lymei-SEU/ESP-PCT}.

NN-Defined Modulator: Reconfigurable and Portable Software Modulator on IoT Gateways

A physical-layer modulator is a vital component for an IoT gateway to map the symbols to signals. However, due to the soldered hardware chipsets on the gateway's motherboards or the diverse toolkits on different platforms for the software radio, the existing solutions either have limited extensibility or are platform-specific. Such limitation is hard to ignore when modulation schemes and hardware platforms have become extremely diverse. This paper presents a new paradigm of using neural networks as an abstraction layer for physical layer modulators in IoT gateway devices, referred to as NN-defined modulators. Our approach addresses the challenges of extensibility and portability for multiple technologies on various hardware platforms. The proposed NN-defined modulator uses a model-driven methodology rooted in solid mathematical foundations while having native support for hardware acceleration and portability to heterogeneous platforms. We conduct the evaluation of NN-defined modulators on different platforms, including Nvidia Jetson Nano and Raspberry Pi. Evaluations demonstrate that our NN-defined modulator effectively operates as conventional modulators and provides significant efficiency gains (up to $4.7\times$ on Nvidia Jetson Nano and $1.1\times$ on Raspberry Pi), indicating high portability. Furthermore, we show the real-world applications using our NN-defined modulators to generate ZigBee and WiFi packets, which are compliant with commodity TI CC2650 (ZigBee) and Intel AX201 (WiFi NIC), respectively.

Cross Vision-RF Gait Re-identification with Low-cost RGB-D Cameras and mmWave Radars

Human identification is a key requirement for many applications in everyday life, such as personalized services, automatic surveillance, continuous authentication, and contact tracing during pandemics, etc. This work studies the problem of cross-modal human re-identification (ReID), in response to the regular human movements across camera-allowed regions (e.g., streets) and camera-restricted regions (e.g., offices) deployed with heterogeneous sensors. By leveraging the emerging low-cost RGB-D cameras and mmWave radars, we propose the first-of-its-kind vision-RF system for cross-modal multi-person ReID at the same time. Firstly, to address the fundamental inter-modality discrepancy, we propose a novel signature synthesis algorithm based on the observed specular reflection model of a human body. Secondly, an effective cross-modal deep metric learning model is introduced to deal with interference caused by unsynchronized data across radars and cameras. Through extensive experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments, we demonstrate that our proposed system is able to achieve ~92.5% top-1 accuracy and ~97.5% top-5 accuracy out of 56 volunteers. We also show that our proposed system is able to robustly reidentify subjects even when multiple subjects are present in the sensors' field of view.