Merging RFID, visual and gesture recognition technologies to generate and manage smart environments

A multi-technology platform is considered to interact and cooperate with complex heterogeneous domestic or industrial environments. This way an automatic set up of the digital representation of such spaces is possible, that we shall call smart spaces, in which identifying, localizing, monitoring and updating different real objects is carried out in real time. Natural interaction with tagged and untagged items may then be carried by different users´ categories having various needs. This may be accomplished by augmenting the RFID technology with a) direction finding capabilities of a monopulse radar, to remotely discover and select items; b) gesture recognition, to enable the user to interact with the Smart Space and the devices in a natural way; c) computer vision based item recognition, to allow objects themselves to act as natural tags. Interoperability of all these technologies is made possible by a suitable software infrastructure.