Activity Recognition using Visual Tracking and RFID (Krahnstoever, Rittscher, Tu, Chean & Tomlinson)

Summary:

This paper discusses the combination of RFID and video tracking, so as to help determine what people are doing in their interactions with tagged objects. Their system uses camera data together with mathematical models of the human body to track a human's head and hands in 3D space. An RFID tracking unit detects the presence, location, and orientation of RFID tags in 3D space which are attached to objects. They believe that by combining these sources of information, it should be possible to recognize activity such as theft or tampering with retail items.


Discussion:

This paper has a decent, if fairly straightforward, idea. Yes, combining different types of data should allow for better recognition. A more thorough user study would be nice.

Reading about the way the system uses visual tracking made me think more about the situations where a glove would be more useful than cameras. For casual, everyday activities, where you might want to track the motion of one user in several locations, a glove would be a better choice if it could be wireless and send a signal to a recording device on a more stable part of a person's body. It would have to be voluntary, so it's probably not ever going to be very useful for security purposes (though it might be possible to identify when a person takes a glove off based on glove data.)