Use of Functional Ink in a Smart Tag for Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry

Abstract

In the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, current labelling solutions have challenges to meet the track & trace requirements. Currently, FMCG items use mainly paper-based self-adhesive labels with traditional barcodes. These labels are low priced and technically easy to produce and deploy. The shift towards advanced solutions, like radio frequency identification (RFID) or near field communication (NFC) tags, still does not offer a good enough cost/benefit ratio. These advanced solutions have a high unit price or require costly changes in production lines. Still, the industry recognizes the possibilities of smart tags. Recent research has shown that functional inks can operate as cheap sensors. However, more research is needed to take functional inks into the operational FMCG environment. This paper presents one technical solution for an FMCG smart tag. The proposed smart tag builds on traditional QR-Code and Datamatrix markers, printed with standard inks. However, it also has functional ink embedded inside the marker as a sensor. This research experiments how embedding impacts the overall performance of the smart tag decoding. And if the CIEDE2000 color difference algorithm can calculate the state of the sensor. Three different parameter combinations, CIEDE2000(1, 1, 1), CIEDE2000(2, 1, 1), CIEDE2000(2.76, 1.58, 1), and their accuracy are compared. Experiments show that the proposed approach does not negatively affect the decoding performance. And that a color comparison can detect sensor states, especially when the functional ink has high enough color intensity. Between different parameters, CIEDE2000(2.76, 1.58, 1) performed best, especially in the low-intensity test. However, some future research needs to address absolute color value detection and the accuracy of color recognition; especially when if the color has low intensity.