skip to main content
10.1145/2639108.2642901acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobicomConference Proceedingsconference-collections
poster

Poster: styrofoam: a tightly packed coding scheme for camera-based visible light communication

Published: 07 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Screen-to-camera visible-light communication links are fundamentally limited by inter-symbol interference, in which the camera receives multiple overlapping symbols in a single capture exposure. By determining interference constraints, we are able to decode symbols with multi-bit depth across all three color channels. We present Styrofoam, a coding scheme which optimally satisfies the constraints by inserting blank frames into the transmission pattern. The coding scheme improves upon the state-of-the-art in camera-based visible-light communication by: (1) ensuring a decode with at least half-exposure of colored multi-bit symbols, (2) limiting decode latency to two transmission frames, and (3) transmitting 0.4 bytes per grid block at the slowest camera's frame rate. In doing so, we outperform peer unsynchronized VLC transmission schemes by 2.9x. Our implementation on smartphone displays and cameras achieves 69.1 kbps.

References

[1]
T. Hao, R. Zhou, and G. Xing. Cobra: color barcode streaming for smartphone systems. In Proc. Mobisys, pages 85--98. ACM, 2012.
[2]
W. Hu, H. Gu, and Q. Pu. Lightsync: unsynchronized visual communication over screen-camera links. In Proc. Mobicom, pages 15--26. ACM, 2013.
[3]
T. Langlotz and O. Bimber. Unsynchronized 4d barcodes. Advances in Visual Computing, pages 363--374, 2007.
[4]
R. LiKamWa, B. Priyantha, M. Philipose, L. Zhong, and P. Bahl. Energy characterization and optimization of image sensing toward continuous mobile vision. In Proc. MobiSys. ACM, 2013.
[5]
D. O'Brien, L. Zeng, H. Le-Minh, G. Faulkner, J. W. Walewski, and S. Randel. Visible light communications: Challenges and possibilities. In Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, 2008. PIMRC 2008. IEEE 19th International Symposium on, pages 1--5. IEEE, 2008.
[6]
S. Perli, N. Ahmed, and D. Katabi. Pixnet: interference-free wireless links using lcd-camera pairs. In Proc. Mobicom. ACM, 2010.

Index Terms

  1. Poster: styrofoam: a tightly packed coding scheme for camera-based visible light communication

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiCom '14: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
      September 2014
      650 pages
      ISBN:9781450327831
      DOI:10.1145/2639108
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 07 September 2014

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. camera synchronization
      2. mobile systems
      3. visible light communications

      Qualifiers

      • Poster

      Conference

      MobiCom'14
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      MobiCom '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 220 submissions, 16%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • 0
        Total Citations
      • 163
        Total Downloads
      • Downloads (Last 12 months)2
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
      Reflects downloads up to 27 Jan 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media