We explore hand-gesture recognition through the use of passive body-worn reflective tags. A data processing pipeline is proposed to address the issue of missing data. Specifically, missing information is recovered through linear and exponential interpolation and extrapolation. Furthermore, imputation and proximity-based inference are employed. We represent tags as nodes in a temporal graph, with edges formed based on correlations between received signal strength (RSS) and phase values across successive timestamps, and we train a graph-based convolutional neural network that exploits graph-based self-attention. The system outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an accuracy of 98.13% for the recognition of 21 gestures. We achieve 89.28% accuracy under leave-one-person-out cross-validation. We further investigate the contribution of various body locations on the recognition accuracy. Removing tags from the arms reduces accuracy by more than 10%, while removing the wrist tag only reduces accuracy by around 2%. Therefore, tag placements on the arms are more expressive for gesture recognition than on the wrist.
@article{arxiv.2601.16301,
title = {Gesture Recognition from body-Worn RFID under Missing Data},
author = {Sahar Golipoor and Richard T. Brophy and Ying Liu and Reza Ghazalian and Stephan Sigg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16301},
year = {2026}
}