Learning-Based Cleansing for Indoor RFID Data

Abstract

RFID is widely used for object tracking in indoor environments, e.g., airport baggage tracking. Analyzing RFID data offers insight into the underlying tracking systems as well as the associated business processes. However, the inherent uncertainty in RFID data, including noise (cross readings) and incompleteness (missing readings), pose challenges to high-level RFID data querying and analysis. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a learning-based data cleansing approach that, unlike existing approaches, requires no detailed prior knowledge about the spatio-temporal properties of the indoor space and the RFID reader deployment. Requiring only minimal information about RFID deployment, the approach learns relevant knowledge from raw RFID data and uses it to cleanse the data. In particular, we model raw RFID readings as time series that are sparse because the indoor space is only partly covered by a limited number of RFID readers.