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Creators/Authors contains: "Mahmud, Saif"

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  1. Smart glasses have become more prevalent as they provide an increasing number of applications for users. They store various types of private information or can access it via connections established with other devices. Therefore, there is a growing need for user identification on smart glasses. In this paper, we introduce a low-power and minimally-obtrusive system called SonicID, designed to authenticate users on glasses. SonicID extracts unique biometric information from users by scanning their faces with ultrasonic waves and utilizes this information to distinguish between different users, powered by a customized binary classifier with the ResNet-18 architecture. SonicID can authenticate users by scanning their face for 0.06 seconds. A user study involving 40 participants confirms that SonicID achieves a true positive rate of 97.4%, a false positive rate of 4.3%, and a balanced accuracy of 96.6% using just 1 minute of training data collected for each new user. This performance is relatively consistent across different remounting sessions and days. Given this promising performance, we further discuss the potential applications of SonicID and methods to improve its performance in the future. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 21, 2025
  2. We present ActSonic, an intelligent, low-power active acoustic sensing system integrated into eyeglasses that can recognize 27 different everyday activities (e.g., eating, drinking, toothbrushing) from inaudible acoustic waves around the body. It requires only a pair of miniature speakers and microphones mounted on each hinge of the eyeglasses to emit ultrasonic waves, creating an acoustic aura around the body. The acoustic signals are reflected based on the position and motion of various body parts, captured by the microphones, and analyzed by a customized self-supervised deep learning framework to infer the performed activities on a remote device such as a mobile phone or cloud server. ActSonic was evaluated in user studies with 19 participants across 19 households to track its efficacy in everyday activity recognition. Without requiring any training data from new users (leave-one-participant-out evaluation), ActSonic detected 27 activities, achieving an average F1-score of 86.6% in fully unconstrained scenarios and 93.4% in prompted settings at participants' homes. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 21, 2025
  3. We present Ring-a-Pose, a single untethered ring that tracks continuous 3D hand poses. Located in the center of the hand, the ring emits an inaudible acoustic signal that each hand pose reflects differently. Ring-a-Pose imposes minimal obtrusions on the hand, unlike multi-ring or glove systems. It is not affected by the choice of clothing that may cover wrist-worn systems. In a series of three user studies with a total of 36 participants, we evaluate Ring-a-Pose's performance on pose tracking and micro-finger gesture recognition. Without collecting any training data from a user, Ring-a-Pose tracks continuous hand poses with a joint error of 14.1mm. The joint error decreases to 10.3mm for fine-tuned user-dependent models. Ring-a-Pose recognizes 7-class micro-gestures with a 90.60% and 99.27% accuracy for user-independent and user-dependent models, respectively. Furthermore, the ring exhibits promising performance when worn on any finger. Ring-a-Pose enables the future of smart rings to track and recognize hand poses using relatively low-power acoustic sensing. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 21, 2025
  4. In this paper, we introduce PoseSonic, an intelligent acoustic sensing solution for smartglasses that estimates upper body poses. Our system only requires two pairs of microphones and speakers on the hinges of the eyeglasses to emit FMCW-encoded inaudible acoustic signals and receive reflected signals for body pose estimation. Using a customized deep learning model, PoseSonic estimates the 3D positions of 9 body joints including the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and nose. We adopt a cross-modal supervision strategy to train our model using synchronized RGB video frames as ground truth. We conducted in-lab and semi-in-the-wild user studies with 22 participants to evaluate PoseSonic, and our user-independent model achieved a mean per joint position error of 6.17 cm in the lab setting and 14.12 cm in semi-in-the-wild setting when predicting the 9 body joint positions in 3D. Our further studies show that the performance was not significantly impacted by different surroundings or when the devices were remounted or by real-world environmental noise. Finally, we discuss the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of deploying PoseSonic in real-world applications. 
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