TaggedAR: An RFID-Based Approach for Recognition of Multiple Tagged Objects in Augmented Reality Systems

With computer vision-based technologies, current Augmented reality (AR) systems can effectively recognize multiple objects with different visual characteristics. However, only limited degrees of distinctions can be offered among different objects with similar natural features, and inherent information about these objects cannot be effectively extracted. In this paper, we propose TaggedAR, i.e., an RFID-based approach to assist the recognition of multiple tagged objects in AR systems, by deploying additional RFID antennas to the COTS depth camera. By sufficiently exploring the correlations between the depth of field and the received RF-signal, we propose a rotate scanning-based scheme to distinguish multiple tagged objects in the stationary situation, and propose a continuous scanning-based scheme to distinguish multiple tagged human subjects in the mobile situation. By pairing the tags with the objects according to the correlations between the depth of field and RF-signals, we can accurately identify and distinguish multiple tagged objects to realize the vision of “tell me what I see” from the AR system. We have implemented a prototype system to evaluate the actual performance with case studies in a real-world environment. The experiment results show that our solution achieves an average match ratio of 91 percent in distinguishing up to dozens of tagged objects with a high deployment density.