ShopMiner: Mining customer shopping behavior in physical clothing stores with COTS RFID devices

Shopping behavior data are of great importance to understand the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising efforts. Online clothing stores are capable capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click stream and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to identify comprehensive shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which items of clothes they pay attention to, and which items of clothes they usually match with. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached on desired items will demonstrate distinct yet stable patterns in the time-series when customers look at, pick up or turn over desired items. We design ShopMiner, a framework that harnesses these unique spatial-temporal correlations of time-series phase readings to detect comprehensive shopping behaviors. We have implemented a prototype of ShopMiner with a COTS RFID reader and four antennas, and tested its effectiveness in two typical indoor environments. Empirical studies from twoweek shopping-like data show that ShopMiner could achieve high accuracy and efficiency in customer shopping behavior identification.