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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.

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  • (2024)Display Field Communication: Enabling Seamless Data Exchange in Screen–Camera EnvironmentsPhotonics10.3390/photonics1111100011:11(1000)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)RescQR: Enabling Reliable Data Recovery in Screen-Camera Communication SystemIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.3277212(1-13)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2023)Symbol Position Recovery for Optical Camera Communication With High-Density Matrix CodesIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology10.1109/TCSVT.2022.323164833:7(3071-3086)Online publication date: Jul-2023
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  1. Styrofoam: a tightly packed coding scheme for camera-based visible light communication

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      VLCS '14: Proceedings of the 1st ACM MobiCom workshop on Visible light communication systems
      September 2014
      58 pages
      ISBN:9781450330671
      DOI:10.1145/2643164
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 07 September 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. Mobile systems
      2. visible light communication

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      VLCS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 8 of 8 submissions, 100%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 21 of 28 submissions, 75%

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Display Field Communication: Enabling Seamless Data Exchange in Screen–Camera EnvironmentsPhotonics10.3390/photonics1111100011:11(1000)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
      • (2024)RescQR: Enabling Reliable Data Recovery in Screen-Camera Communication SystemIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.3277212(1-13)Online publication date: 2024
      • (2023)Symbol Position Recovery for Optical Camera Communication With High-Density Matrix CodesIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology10.1109/TCSVT.2022.323164833:7(3071-3086)Online publication date: Jul-2023
      • (2022)Investigations on Temporal Sampling and Patternless Frame Recovery for Asynchronous Display-Camera CommunicationIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology10.1109/TCSVT.2021.310671132:6(4004-4015)Online publication date: Jun-2022
      • (2021)High-Throughput Visual MIMO Systems for Screen-Camera CommunicationsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.297704220:6(2200-2211)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
      • (2019)ERSCCProceedings of the Twentieth ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing10.1145/3323679.3326526(281-290)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
      • (2019)A Novel Architecture for Ultra-High Signal-to-Interference-Noise-Ratio Reception in Visible Light Communication2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS.2019.8711377(172-179)Online publication date: Jan-2019
      • (2017)Soft Hint Enabled Adaptive Visible Light Communication over Screen-Camera LinksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2016.255175016:2(527-537)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
      • (2016)FOCUSProceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/2906388.2906399(319-332)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2016
      • (2016)Uber-in-light: Unobtrusive visible light communication leveraging complementary color channelIEEE INFOCOM 2016 - The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM.2016.7524513(1-9)Online publication date: Apr-2016
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