A model-based approach for RFID data stream cleansing

In recent years, RFID technologies have been used in many applications, such as inventory checking and object tracking. However, raw RFID data are inherently unreliable due to physical device limitations and different kinds of environmental noise. Currently, existing work mainly focuses on RFID data cleansing in a static environment (e.g. inventory checking). It is therefore difficult to cleanse RFID data streams in a mobile environment (e.g. object tracking) using the existing solutions, which do not address the data missing issue effectively. In this paper, we study how to cleanse RFID data streams for object tracking, which is a challenging problem, since a significant percentage of readings are routinely dropped. We propose a probabilistic model for object tracking in a mobile environment. We develop a Bayesian inference based approach for cleansing RFID data using the model. In order to sample data from the movement distribution, we devise a sequential sampler that cleans RFID data with high accuracy and efficiency. We validate the effectiveness and robustness of our solution through extensive simulations and demonstrate its performance by using two real RFID applications of human tracking and conveyor belt monitoring.