Simultaneous material identification and target imaging with commodity RFID devices

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2-2022

Abstract

Material identification and target imaging play an important role in many applications. This paper introduces TagScan, a system that can identify the material type and image the horizontal cut of a target simultaneously with cheap commodity Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) devices. The key intuition is that different materials and/or target sizes cause different amounts of phase and RSS (Received Signal Strength) changes, when radio frequency (RF) signal penetrates through the target. Multiple challenges need to be addressed before we can turn the idea into a functional system, including (i) indoor environments exhibit rich multipath which breaks the linear relationship between the phase change and the propagation distance inside a target; (ii) without knowing either material type or target size, trying to obtain these two information simultaneously is challenging; and (iii) stitching pieces of the propagation distances inside a target for an image estimate is non-trivial. We propose solutions to all the challenges and evaluate the system's performance in three different environments. TagScan is able to achieve higher than 94 percent material identification accuracies for 10 liquids and differentiates even very similar objects such as Coke and Pepsi. TagScan can accurately estimate the horizontal cut images of more than one target behind a wall.

Keywords

Imaging, Liquids, Phase measurement, Mobile computing, RFID tags, Shape

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

Volume

20

Issue

2

First Page

739

Last Page

753

ISSN

1536-1233

Identifier

10.1109/TMC.2019.2946072

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

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