WiRD-Gest: Gesture Recognition In The Real World Using Range-Doppler Wi-Fi Sensing on COTS Hardware

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sanson, Jessica, Shah, Rahul C., Zhu, Yazhou, Rosales, Rafael, Frascolla, Valerio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sanson, Jessica
Shah, Rahul C.
Zhu, Yazhou
Rosales, Rafael
Frascolla, Valerio
author_facet Sanson, Jessica
Shah, Rahul C.
Zhu, Yazhou
Rosales, Rafael
Frascolla, Valerio
contents Wi-Fi sensing has emerged as a promising technique for gesture recognition, yet its practical deployment is hindered by environmental sensitivity and device placement challenges. To overcome these limitations we propose Wi-Fi Range and Doppler (WiRD)-Gest, a novel system that performs gesture recognition using a single, unmodified Wi-Fi transceiver on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) laptop. The system leverages an monostatic full duplex sensing pipeline capable of extracting Range-Doppler (RD) information. Utilizing this, we present the first benchmark of deep learning models for gesture recognition based on monostatic sensing. The key innovation lies in how monostatic sensing and spatial (range) information fundamentally transforms accuracy, robustness and generalization compared to prior approaches. We demonstrate excellent performance in crowded, unseen public spaces with dynamic interference and additional moving targets even when trained on data from controlled environments only. These are scenarios where prior Wi-Fi sensing approaches often fail, however, our system suffers minor degradation. The WiRD-Gest benchmark and dataset will also be released as open source.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WiRD-Gest: Gesture Recognition In The Real World Using Range-Doppler Wi-Fi Sensing on COTS Hardware
Sanson, Jessica
Shah, Rahul C.
Zhu, Yazhou
Rosales, Rafael
Frascolla, Valerio
Audio and Speech Processing
Wi-Fi sensing has emerged as a promising technique for gesture recognition, yet its practical deployment is hindered by environmental sensitivity and device placement challenges. To overcome these limitations we propose Wi-Fi Range and Doppler (WiRD)-Gest, a novel system that performs gesture recognition using a single, unmodified Wi-Fi transceiver on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) laptop. The system leverages an monostatic full duplex sensing pipeline capable of extracting Range-Doppler (RD) information. Utilizing this, we present the first benchmark of deep learning models for gesture recognition based on monostatic sensing. The key innovation lies in how monostatic sensing and spatial (range) information fundamentally transforms accuracy, robustness and generalization compared to prior approaches. We demonstrate excellent performance in crowded, unseen public spaces with dynamic interference and additional moving targets even when trained on data from controlled environments only. These are scenarios where prior Wi-Fi sensing approaches often fail, however, our system suffers minor degradation. The WiRD-Gest benchmark and dataset will also be released as open source.
title WiRD-Gest: Gesture Recognition In The Real World Using Range-Doppler Wi-Fi Sensing on COTS Hardware
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22131