X-Ray Vision With Only WiFi Power Measurements Using Rytov Wave Models

Abstract

In this paper, unmanned vehicles are tasked with seeing a completely unknown area behind thick walls based on only wireless power measurements using wireless local area network (WLAN) cards. We show that a proper modeling of wave propagation that considers scattering and other propagation phenomena can result in a considerable improvement in see-through imaging. More specifically, we develop a theoretical and experimental framework for this problem based on Rytov wave models and integrate it with sparse signal processing and robotic path planning. Our experimental results show high-resolution imaging of three different areas, validating the proposed framework. Moreover, they show considerable performance improvement over the state of the art that only considers the line-of-sight (LOS) path, allowing us to image more complex areas not possible before. Finally, we show the impact of robot positioning and antenna alignment errors on our see-through imaging framework.