PowerSkel: A Device-Free Framework Using CSI Signal for Human Skeleton Estimation in Power Station

Safety monitoring of power operations in power stations is crucial for preventing accidents and ensuring stable power supply. However, conventional methods such as wearable devices and video surveillance have limitations, such as high cost, dependence on light, and visual blind spots. WiFi-based human pose estimation is a suitable method for monitoring power operations due to its low cost, device-free, and robustness to various illumination conditions. In this article, a novel channel state information (CSI)-based pose estimation framework, namely, PowerSkel, is developed to address these challenges. PowerSkel utilizes self-developed CSI sensors to form a mutual sensing network and constructs a CSI acquisition scheme specialized for power scenarios. It significantly reduces the deployment cost and complexity compared to the existing solutions. To reduce interference with CSI in the electricity scenario, a sparse adaptive filtering algorithm is designed to preprocess the CSI. CKDformer, a knowledge distillation network based on collaborative learning and self-attention, is proposed to extract the features from CSI and establish the mapping relationship between CSI and keypoints. The experiments are conducted in a real-world power station, and the results show that the PowerSkel achieves high performance with a PCK@50 of 96.27% and realizes a significant visualization on pose estimation, even in dark environments. Our work provides a novel low-cost and high-precision pose estimation solution for power operation.