A smart system to minimize mishandled luggage at airports

Abstract

Passengers' luggage is being reported missing in large amounts yearly at airports around the world due to several reasons. It causes tension to passengers at the destination airports and incurs excessive insurance costs for the airlines. An airport luggage protection system is presented in this paper to serve as a solution to this problem. The presented system ensures that passengers will exit the airport with only their own luggage. The system is based mainly on the RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. RFID tags, placed on both the passenger's ticket and luggage, will contain electronically stored encrypted information captured by scanning luggage tags with a barcode reader. In addition, a camera is used to capture the image of passenger's ticket and software tools developed for image processing are utilized to obtain data for a reference database. A prototype system has been developed and successfully tested.