RF-3DScan: RFID-based 3D Reconstruction on Tagged Packages

Abstract

Currently, the logistic industry has introduced 3D reconstruction to monitor the package placement in the warehouse. Previous 3D reconstruction solutions mainly utilize computer vision or sensor-based methods, which are restricted to the line-of-sight or the battery life. Therefore, we propose a passive RFID-based solution, called RF-3DScan, to perform 3D reconstruction on tagged packages, including the package orientation and the package stacking. The basic idea is that a moving antenna can obtain RF-signals from the tags attached on packages with the 1D linear mobile scanning. Through extracting phase differences to build angle profiles for each tag, RF-3DScan derives their relative positions, further determines the package orientation and the coarse-grained package stacking. By simply performing the 2D scanning, RF-3DScan can provide the fine-grained package stacking determination. We implement a prototype system of RF-3DScan and evaluate its performance in real settings. Our experiment results show that RF-3DScan can achieve about 92.5 percent identification accuracy of the bottom face, and an average error about 4.08 $^\circ$ ∘ of the rotation angle. For the package stacking, 1D scanning can achieve the comparable performance in comparison with 2D scanning.