WiFuse: An Attention Mechanism for Human Activity Recognition using Fused CSI Amplitude and Delay-Doppler Channel Features

Abstract

Recently, Wi-Fi sensing has played a significant role in Human Activity Recognition (HAR), as it enables the detection of various activities using only Wi-Fi signals, ensuring privacy and remaining non-intrusive for the user. However, environmental characteristics such as reflective surfaces, hardware offsets, and other physical impairments affect recognition by the neural network, subsequently causing errors and significantly reducing model accuracy. To overcome this problem we present the WiFuse framework, a dual-stream Channel State Information (CSI) framework for human activity recognition (HAR) that pairs denoised time-domain amplitude variations with 2D-FFT-derived Delay-Doppler motion representations computed from the sanitized channel phase. The fused representation feeds a hybrid ResNet-Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) neural architecture augmented with channel and spatio-temporal attention, where the ResNet extracts spatial-spectral features and the TCN models long-range temporal dependencies; a decoupled two-stage transfer learning strategy is employed to improve optimization stability and feature reuse. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets, including comparisons against state-of-the-art methods and alternative hybrid architectures, ablation studies, and cross-dataset and domain-adaptation evaluations. The proposed framework reaches an overall accuracy of up to 95.28% across the four environments of the XRF55 dataset and up to 98.20% on the multi-user Wi-MIR dataset. Overall, the results indicate that combining amplitude and Delay-Doppler representations within a dual-stream strategy, enhanced by transfer learning, improves recognition performance under conditions that typically degrade deep neural networks, such as class overlap, multipath propagation, noise, and interference.