Foreign Material Detection and Localization in Stored Grain with Passive RFID Tag Arrays

In the early stage of harvesting, transportation, and storage, the grain could be mingled with clods from the field, metal pieces from aging machines, and other objects of foreign material, which will greatly influence the grain quality and food security. In this paper, we propose a novel radio frequency (RF) sensing system termed TagSee, which leverages passive RFID tag arrays. The goal is to simultaneously sense the presence of foreign materials and locate their locations in the 3D space, to automatically monitor the stored grain. Specifically, we use RFID received signal strength (RSS) and phase as features for foreign material detection. To design the TagSee system, we first introduce a sensing space division method. Then, an Euclidean Distance Ratio (EDR) algorithm and a heuristic method are proposed to achieve high localization accuracy. Experimental results show that TagSee can effectively detect foreign materials in stored grain and achieve a centimeter-level localization accuracy.