Object analysis with visual sensors and RFID

Object analysis using visual sensors is one of the most important and challenging issues in computer vision research due principally to difficulties in object representation, segmentation, and recognition within a general framework. This has motivated researchers to investigate exploiting the potential identification capability of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology for object analysis. RFID however, has a number of fundamental limitations including a short sensing range, missing tag detection, not working for all objects, and some items being just too small to be tagged. This has meant applying RFID alone has not been entirely effective in computer vision applications. To address these restrictions, object analysis approaches based on a combination of visual sensors and RFID have recently been successfully introduced. This chapter presents a contemporary review on these object analysis techniques for localisation, tracking, and object and activity recognition, together with some future research directions in this burgeoning field.