LiquImager: Fine-grained Liquid Identification and Container Imaging System with COTS WiFi Devices

Abstract

WiFi has gradually developed into one of the main candidate technologies for ubiquitous sensing. Based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) WiFi devices, this paper proposes LiquImager, which can simultaneously identify liquid and image container regardless of container shape and position. Since the container size is close to the wavelength, diffraction makes the effect of the liquid on the signal difficult to approximate with a simple geometric model (such as ray tracking). Based on Maxwell's equations, we construct an electric field scattering sensing model. Using few measurements provided by COTS WiFi devices, we solve the scattering model to obtain the medium distribution of the sensing domain, which is used for identifing and imaging liquids. To suppress the signal noise, we propose LiqU-Net for image enhancement. For the centimeter-scale container that is randomly placed in an area of 25 cm × 25 cm, LiquImager can identify the liquid more than 90% accuracy. In terms of container imaging, LiquImager can accurately find the edge of the container for 4 types of containers with a volume less than 500 ml.