ViFiCon: Vision and Wireless Association Via Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

Abstract: We introduce ViFiCon, a self-supervised contrastive learning scheme which uses synchronized information across vision and wireless modalities to perform cross-modal association. Specifically, the system uses pedestrian data collected from RGB-D camera footage as well as WiFi Fine Time Measurements (FTM) from a user's smartphone device. We represent the temporal sequence by stacking multi-person depth data spatially within a banded image. Depth data from RGB-D (vision domain) is inherently linked with an observable pedestrian, but FTM data (wireless domain) is associated only to a smartphone on the network. To formulate the cross-modal association problem as self-supervised, the network learns a scene-wide synchronization of the two modalities as a pretext task, and then uses that learned representation for the downstream task of associating individual bounding boxes to specific smartphones, i.e. associating vision and wireless information. We use a pre-trained region proposal model on the camera footage and then feed the extrapolated bounding box information into a dual-branch convolutional neural network along with the FTM data. We show that compared to fully supervised SoTA models, ViFiCon achieves high performance vision-to-wireless association, finding which bounding box corresponds to which smartphone device, without hand-labeled association examples for training data.