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
Citation
1