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With the increasing concern about product quality, attention has shifted to the monitoring of production processes to be assured of good quality. Achieving good quality is a challenging task in the garment industry due to the great complexity of garment products. This paper presents an intelligent system, using fuzzy association rule mining with a recursive process mining algorithm, to find the relationships between production process parameters and product quality. The goal is to derive a set of decision rules for fuzzy logic that will determine the quantitative values of the process parameters. Learnt process parameters used in production form new inputs of the initial step of the mining algorithm so that new sets of rules can be obtained recursively. Radio frequency identification technology is deployed to increase the efficiency of the system. With the recursive characteristics of the system, process parameters can be continually refined for the purpose of achieving quality assurance. A case study is described in which the system is applied in a garment manufacturing company. After a six-month pilot run of the system, the numbers of critical defects, major defects and minor defects were reduced by 7, 20 and 24%, respectively while production time and rework cost improved by 26 and 30%, respectively. Results demonstrate the practical viability of the system to provide decision support for garment manufacturers who may not be able to determine the appropriate process settings for achieving the desired product quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology represents an exciting innovation that has a great potential upside and some significant downsides as well. With its ability to track signals and store data, RFID is helping manufacturers to revolutionize supply chain management, retailers to reduce long lines in stores, and hospitals to track patients and patient files. But consumer privacy advocates are increasingly concerned by what they see as the encroachment of "big brother." This concern, we believe, has the potential to slow or even derail future RFID applications. In order to avoid this outcome, we suggest that RFID technology has the dual responsibility to both effect efficiency and to protect privacy. In this paper we review the current trends in RFID technology, look at how manufacturers and governments are addressing consumer privacy concerns, and end with a recommendation that an alliance be created that includes manufacturers, retailers, government representatives (both as users and as protectors), ethicists, academicians, and industry leaders/executives to develop acceptable and implementable guidelines for the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by libraries promises a solution that could make it possible to inventory hundreds of thousands of items in their collections in days instead of months. In addition, it would allow patrons to check out and return library property automatically at any time of the day. Besides speeding up checkouts, keeping collections in better order, and alleviating repetitive strain injuries among librarians, RFID promises to provide a better control on theft, nonreturns, and misfiling of a library's assets. With an estimated 35 million library items tagged worldwide in more than three hundred libraries, this technology is generating ever-increasing interest. In October and November 2004, the industrial technology department and the Robert E. Kennedy Library at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo, surveyed participating libraries, RFID electronic discussion groups, and Library and Information Technology Association (LITA-L) electronic discussion group subscribers to collect information with regards to the implementation of RFID systems in libraries. Opinions were gathered regarding such topics, actual or estimated, as RFID implementation costs and time; the impact of the technology on operations such as handling of volumes and security; and RFID system eatures adopted such as conversion stations, self-checkout units, and security systems. Information on the various RFID library components and the results from the survey are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video‐based person re‐identification aims to match pedestrians from video sequences across non‐overlapping cameras. A major challenge of the person re‐identification is the serious intra‐class distance caused by cropped frames variation in video sequences. To address this issue, a novel sequences consistency feature learning (SCFL) framework for video‐based person re‐identification is proposed. Specifically, SCFL utilizes a deep neural network and the proposed sequences consistency loss to learn sequences‐invariant features for each pedestrian, which decreases the intra‐class distance across the partial occlusions, inaccurate detection and viewpoint variation. During the training process, SCFL slices the video‐level features and computes the cosine similarity between disjoint sequences features pairs of the same pedestrian as the sequences consistency loss to minimize the intra‐class distance. The experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the performance of the existing deep networks and achieves competitive performance on the large‐scale benchmark datasets including MARS and DukeMTMC‐VideoReID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Whistler-Blackcomb (WB) Mega Day challenge requires a skier to ride all 24 lifts at the resort in a single day. Among over two million people who ski annually at WB, only 313 completed the challenge in the 14 months following the introduction of a system that tracks lift use by skier. Apart from the physical challenge of skiing, a key difficulty is finding a route that matches one's skill level while accounting for variable lift opening and closing times. We use data from WB's radio-frequency identification (RFID) ticketing system to estimate ski times between lifts for skiers of various skill levels. We then formulate and solve the problem by a combined, iterative integer programming and heuristic approach, up to the highest feasible skier skill level. The problem's distinctive features preclude the use of known solution methods for similar problems; therefore, we use a practical, staged-solution approach. Our results include a recommended route that enables the greatest number of skiers, roughly the fastest quartile, to achieve the challenge. We also provide a benchmark that skiers who can ski a particular common run in 12 minutes or less should be able to complete the challenge. In the three months following communication of our recommended solution, the rate at which skiers completed the Mega Day challenge increased by two-thirds over the previous seven skiing months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An RFID network is a network in which a reader inquire about the identities of tags and tags respond with their identities to a reader. The diversity of RFID networks has brought about many applications including an inexpensive system where a single reader supports a small number of tags. Such a system needs a tag cognizance scheme that is able to arbitrate among contending tags as well as is simple enough. In this paper, confining our attention to a clan of simple schemes, we propose a randomized scheme with aiming at enhancing the tag cognizance rate than a conventional scheme. Then, we derive an exact expression for the cognizance rate attained by the randomized scheme. Unfortunately, the exact expression is not so tractable as to optimize the randomized scheme. As an alternative way, we develop an upper bound on the tag cognizance rate. In a closed form, we then obtain a nearly optimal value for a key design parameter, which maximizes the upper bound. Numerical examples confirm that the randomized scheme is able to dominate the conventional scheme in cognizance rate by employing a nearly optimal value. Furthermore, they reveal that the randomized scheme is robust to the fallacy that the reader believes or guesses a wrong number of neighboring tags. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a fine-grained positioning method for radio frequency identification (RFID). The proposed method applies hyperbolic positioning to locate ultrahigh frequency passive RFID tags. In our design, finding the tagged object’s location is formulated as an optimization problem. Phase values, collected by the moving antenna, are exploited to achieve the optimal solution. The intuition of hyperbolic positioning lies in that the difference of distances from a target tag to two antennas can be inferred from phases. When integrating hyperbola curves together, optimization method can be performed to achieve the object’s location. Particle swarm optimization is then applied to enhance computational ability. For random phases, polynomial regression is employed to model the relationship between phase values and distances. We implement a prototype of hyperbolic positioning optimization to pinpoint the RFID tag’s location and evaluate its performance in our laboratory environment. Compared with other RFID localization methods, i.e., received signal strength indicator based and phase-based approaches, our design shows greater tolerance to tag diversity and tag orientation.

Note to Practitioners—Radio frequency identification (RFID), as a crucial component of the Internet of things, has been widely deployed in many industrial applications ranging from logistics to retail. There are increasing needs for RFID to not only detect whether the tagged object is within the radio range, but also locate the object with high accuracy. Current RFID systems addressing these problems are either expensive or complex to implement. The RFID-based localization method presented in this paper is cost-efficient and computationally inexpensive. We consider using commercial off-the-shelf RFID devices without deployment of the reference tags to locate the target object. The antenna is mounted on a mobile vehicle to emulate the antenna array. Due to the fact that the target tag lies on the hyperbolic curve with two antennas’ positions as the foci, this paper suggests constructing multiple hyperbolas to determine the target position based on the virtual antenna array. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is feasible and achieves a median accuracy of 12 cm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By combining radio-frequency identification (RFID) and paper-microfluidics technologies, a low-cost first-of-its-kind platform for comprehensive liquid sensing, i.e., the “smart test strip,” is presented, which enables portable wireless real-time liquid sensing with handhold devices (e.g., cell phones), and integration of various multifunctional electrical and chemical sensors, for numerous Lab-on-Chip applications, including manufacturing control, environmental monitoring, and point-of-care medical diagnostics. The fabrication of RFID tags and two types of microfluidics are accomplished by a single inkjet-printing process in a cost-effective environmental-friendly additive manufacturing approach, which makes possible the production of disposable, lightweight, and flexible sensing platforms. Taking advantage of the proposed smart test strips platforms, we demonstrate two proof-of-concept high-performance electrical sensors based on interdigitated electrode topologies: a resistivity-based sensor with a 1782 $\Omega$/( $\Omega$*m) sensitivity; nevertheless, the proposed permittivity-based sensor with a 15%/$\epsilon _r$ sensitivity, but the proposed integrated wireless platform, can facilitate the integration of even more chemical and electrical sensors. In addition, two on-strip antenna prototypes have been designed, optimized, and tested to work at 2.4 GHz and 13.56 MHz, respectively. Furthermore, the wireless interrogation of a complete proof-of-concept smart test strip is presented, which shows an excellent sensing resolution of 1.33 $\Omega$ over the range of 0–1371 $\Omega$. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a real-time RFID system capable of tracking laboratory animals is designed and implemented. Four passive RFID tags based on low frequency are designed and implemented. The tags can be read by any RFID reader that operates on the low frequency range 125-134 kHz. The tags are designed through the investigation of various antenna, encoding, modulation, and energy harvesting techniques. The tag receives the electromagnetic signal via the antenna, and converts it to a DC signal that the microcontroller can use to manipulate the electromagnetic signal with the data such that the reader can decode the unique tag identifier. RFID sensors are designed and implemented to collect data from various monitored areas of a semi natural environment. The data is sent to a central data coordinator for pre-processing and middleware for data error checking, display and storage. The RFID system can successfully detect and store movement data in real time. A read range of 14.5 cm is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field Communication systems are found in various user-friendly services that all of us deal with in our daily lives. As these systems are ubiquitously deployed in different authentication and identification applications, inferring information about our behavior will be possible by monitoring our use of them. In order to provide privacy and security requirements of RFID users in novel authentication applications, lots of security schemes have been proposed which have tried to provide secure and untraceable communication for end-users. In this paper, we investigate the privacy of three RFID security schemes which have been proposed recently. For privacy analysis, we use the well-known RFID formal privacy model proposed by Ouafi and Phan. We show that all the studied protocols have some privacy drawbacks, making them vulnerable to various traceability attacks. Moreover, in order to overcome all the reported weaknesses and prevent the presented attacks, we apply some modifications in the structures of the studied protocols and propose an improved version of each one. Our analyses show that the modified protocols are more efficient than their previous versions and new modifications can omit all the existing weaknesses on the analyzed protocols. Finally, we compare the modified protocols with some new-found RFID authentication protocols in the terms of security and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]