RFID Landslide Monitoring: Long-Term Outdoor Signal Processing and Phase Unwrapping

Localization of passive Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags has been used to monitor landslide surface displacement since 5 years. This method, applied on slow displacements lower than 1cm per day, allows a high spatio-temporal resolution at a relatively low cost. With the feedback of the previous years, this paper proposes to summarize the various challenges encountered with the long-term outdoor RFID localization method, and presents data-processing solutions that were implemented to overcome these challenges. We propose a complex-smoothing unwrapping algorithm, a multi-frequency merging operation, as well as multi-tag and multi-antenna phase combining method. The concept of an unwrapping reference guide is presented and applied with groups of tags showing coherent displacements, or with absolute reference measurements. These approaches allow a higher data availability up to 38% for one site over multiple years, and a better phase unwrapping. Earth surface displacement monitoring with RFID proves to be a robust and accurate solution, with four equipped sites across France and Switzerland.