Physics-Informed WiFi Sensing for Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation in Mobile and Cross-Environment Settings

Abstract

Device-free human pose estimation using commodity WiFi signals has emerged as a promising paradigm for pervasive sensing in mobile computing systems. However, existing approaches often suffer from severe performance degradation when deployed across heterogeneous environments due to complex multipath propagation and domain shifts in wireless signals. In this paper, we present a physics-informed WiFi sensing framework for robust 3D human pose estimation under mobile and cross-environment settings. Our approach explicitly models wireless signal propagation characteristics and incorporates multipath-aware attention to capture environment-dependent signal variations. To further improve generalization, we introduce a disentangled representation learning scheme that separates pose-related features from environment-specific factors, enabling effective cross-domain adaptation without requiring extensive retraining. We implement our system using commodity WiFi devices and evaluate it on multiple public benchmarks, including Person-in-WiFi-3D and MM-Fi, as well as real-world deployments across diverse indoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves robustness and generalization performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly under cross-environment scenarios. These results highlight the potential of physics-informed wireless sensing for enabling reliable, scalable, and infrastructure-free human-centric applications in mobile computing systems.

12pages 6figures