Complementary Color Barcode-Based Optical Camera Communications

Abstract

Electronic displays and cameras can provide an intuitive, simple communications interface without dependence on additional wireless interfaces or the Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we design a complementary color barcode-based optical camera communication (CCB-OCC) system to provide an easy-to-use communication capability from an electronic display-to-camera (D2C) link. The proposed method encodes information into specially designed color barcodes and transmits it in a format perceptually invisible to humans but detectable by camera-equipped devices. In addition, we propose a new transmission packet design that contains pilot symbols to synchronize symbol packets and estimate the D2C channel link for calibrating captured images caused by irregular differences between the sending color and the receiving color in the D2C link. Experimental results verify the feasibility of the CCB-OCC scheme for short-range communications to offer additional information which shows a new possibility in designing a D2C communication system with robust to environmental change, easy-to-use, and simple implementation.