skip to main content
10.1145/2906388.2906399acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobisysConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

FOCUS: Robust Visual Codes for Everyone

Published: 20 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Visual codes are used to embed digital data in physical objects, or they are shown in video sequences to transfer data over screen/camera links. Existing codes either carry limited data to make them robust against a range of channel conditions (e.g., low camera quality or long distances), or they support a high data capacity but only work over a narrow range of channel conditions. We present FOCUS, a new code design that does not require this explicit trade-off between code capacity and the reader's channel quality. Instead, FOCUS builds on concepts from OFDM to encode data at different levels of spatial detail. This enables each reader to decode as much data from a code as its channel quality allows. We build a prototype of FOCUS devices and evaluate it experimentally. Our results show that FOCUS gracefully adapts to the reader's channel, and that it provides a significant performance improvement over recently proposed designs, including Strata and PixNet.

References

[1]
F. Ababsa and M. Mallem. Robust Camera Pose Estimation Using 2D Fiducials Tracking for Real-time Augmented Reality Systems. In Proc. of VRCAI '04. ACM, 2004.
[2]
A. Ashok, S. Jain, M. Gruteser, N. Mandayam, W. Yuan, and K. Dana. Capacity of Pervasive Camera Based Communication Under Perspective Distortions. In Proc. of PerCom '14. IEEE, March 2014.
[3]
A. C. S. Atsushi Ito, A. Veeraraghavan, and R. G. Baraniuk. Blurburst: Removing blur due to camera shake using multiple images. ACM Transactions on Graphics, to appear.
[4]
C. B. Bose and I. Amir. Design of Fiducials for Accurate Registration Using Machine Vision. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Dec. 1990.
[5]
G. Bradski. The OpenCV Library. Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools, 2000.
[6]
J. W. Byers, M. Luby, M. Mitzenmacher, and A. Rege. A Digital Fountain Approach to Reliable Distribution of Bulk Data. SIGCOMM Computer Communincation Review, 28(4), Oct. 1998.
[7]
T. P. Diakos, J. A. Briffa, T. W. C. Brown, and S. Wesemeyer. Eavesdropping Near-Field Contactless Payments: a Quantitative Analysis. The Journal of Engineering, January 2013.
[8]
European Committee for Standardization. Automatic Identification and Data Capture Techniques -- QR Code 2005 Bar Code Symbology Specification: ISO/IEC 18004--2006. 2006.
[9]
M. Frigo. A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler. In Proc. of PLDI '99. ACM, 1999.
[10]
T. Hao, R. Zhou, and G. Xing. Cobra: Color Barcode Streaming For Smartphone Systems. In Proc. of MobiSys. ACM, 2012.
[11]
F. Hermans, L. McNamara, and T. Voigt. Demo: Scalable Visual Codes for Embedding Digital Data in the Physical World. In Proc. of SenSys '15. ACM, 2015.
[12]
S. Hranilovic and F. Kschischang. A Pixelated MIMO Wireless Optical Communication System. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 12(4), 2006.
[13]
W. Hu, H. Gu, and Q. Pu. LightSync: Unsynchronized Visual Communication over Screen-camera Links. In Proc. of MobiCom '13. ACM, 2013.
[14]
W. Hu, J. Mao, Z. Huang, Y. Xue, J. She, K. Bian, and G. Shen. Strata: Layered Coding for Scalable Visual Communication. In Proc. of MobiCom '14. ACM, 2014.
[15]
Y. Huang, W. Wang, and L. Wang. Bidirectional recurrent convolutional networks for multi-frame super-resolution. In C. Cortes, N. D. Lawrence, D. D. Lee, M. Sugiyama, and R. Garnett, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28. Curran Associates, Inc., 2015.
[16]
ISO. Information technology--Automatic Identification and Data Capture Techniques--Data Matrix Bar Code Symbology Specification. Number ISO/IEC 16022:2006. Geneva, Switzerland, 2006.
[17]
ISO. Information Technology -- Automatic Identification and Data Capture Techniques -- Aztec Code Bar Code Symbology Specification. Number ISO/IEC 24778:2008. Geneva, Switzerland, 2008.
[18]
T.-W. Kan, C.-H. Teng, and W.-S. Chou. Applying QR Code in Augmented Reality Applications. In Proc. of VRCAI '09. ACM, 2009.
[19]
V. Lepetit and P. Fua. Monocular Model-based 3D Tracking of Rigid Objects. Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision, 1(1), Jan. 2005.
[20]
A. Lerner, A. Saxena, K. Ouimet, B. Turley, A. Vance, T. Kohno, and F. Roesner. Analyzing the Use of Quick Response Codes in the Wild. In Proc. of MobiSys. ACM, 2015.
[21]
T. Li, C. An, X. Xiao, A. T. Campbell, and X. Zhou. Real-Time Screen-Camera Communication Behind Any Scene. In Proc. of MobiSys '15. ACM, 2015.
[22]
R. LiKamWa, D. Ramirez, and J. Holloway. Styrofoam: A Tightly Packed Coding Scheme for Camera-based Visible Light Communication. In Proc. of MobiCom Workshop on Visible Light Communication Systems. ACM, 2014.
[23]
S. Mayer and G. Soros. User Interface Beaming -- Seamless Interaction with Smart Things Using Personal Wearable Computers. In Proc of. Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks Workshops (BSN Workshops), June 2014.
[24]
Motorala Inc. The Next-Generation Warehouse -- Long Range Scanning And Emergence of 2D Bar Codes. Technical report, 2011.
[25]
C. Mulliner. Vulnerability Analysis and Attacks on NFC-Enabled Mobile Phones. In Proc. of ARES '09, pages 695--700, March 2009.
[26]
A. V. Oppenheim, A. S. Willsky, and S. H. Nawab. Signals and Systems. Prentice-Hall, Inc., NJ, USA, 1996.
[27]
D. Parikh and G. Jancke. Localization and Segmentation of a 2D High Capacity Color Barcode. In Proc. of Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision. IEEE, 2008.
[28]
S. D. Perli. MIT Masters Thesis - PixNet: Designing Interference-free Wireless Links Using LCD-camera Pairs, 2010.
[29]
S. D. Perli, N. Ahmed, and D. Katabi. PixNet: Interference-free Wireless Links Using LCD-camera Pairs. In Proc. of MobiCom '10. ACM, 2010.
[30]
T. Pollet, M. Van Bladel, and M. Moeneclaey. BER Sensitivity of OFDM Systems to Carrier Frequency Offset and Wiener Phase Noise. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 43(2/3/4), Feb 1995.
[31]
Y. Rahmatallah and S. Mohan. Peak-To-Average Power Ratio Reduction in OFDM Systems: A Survey And Taxonomy. IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials, 15(4):1567--1592, April 2013.
[32]
I. Reed and G. Solomon. Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields. Journal of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 8(2), June 1960.
[33]
T. Schmidl and D. Cox. Robust Frequency and Timing Synchronization for OFDM. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 45(12), Dec 1997.
[34]
S. Shi, L. Chen, W. Hu, and M. Gruteser. Reading Between Lines: High-rate, Non-intrusive Visual Codes Within Regular Videos via ImplicitCode. In Proc. of UbiComp '15. ACM, 2015.
[35]
A. Shokrollahi. Raptor Codes. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 14(SI), June 2006.
[36]
M. Sonka, V. Hlavac, and R. Boyle. Image Processing, Analysis, and Machine Vision. CL Engineering, 2007.
[37]
T. Vidas, E. Owusu, S. Wang, C. Zeng, L. Cranor, and N. Christin. QRishing: The Susceptibility of Smartphone Users to QR Code Phishing Attacks. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013.
[38]
A. Wang, Z. Li, C. Peng, G. Shen, G. Fang, and B. Zeng. InFrame: Achieve Simultaneous Screen-Human Viewing and Hidden Screen-Camera Communication. In Proc. of MobiSys '15. ACM, 2015.
[39]
A. Wang, S. Ma, C. Hu, J. Huai, C. Peng, and G. Shen. Enhancing Reliability to Boost the Throughput over Screen-Camera Links. In Proc. of MobiCom '14. ACM, 2014.
[40]
Q. Wang, M. Zhou, K. Ren, T. Lei, J. Li, and Z. Wang. Rain Bar: Robust Application-Driven Visual Communication Using Color Barcodes. In Proc. of ICDCS '15, June 2015.
[41]
H. Yao and D. Shin. Towards Preventing QR Code Based Attacks on Android Phone Using Security Warnings. In Proc. of ASIA CCS '13. ACM, 2013.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)When VLC Meets Under-Screen CameraProceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3581791.3596855(343-355)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
  • (2022)MobiScanTransactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies10.1002/ett.415133:4Online publication date: 17-Apr-2022
  • (2020)Distance-Dependent Barcodes for Context-Aware Mobile Applications22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3379503.3403534(1-11)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2020
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
June 2016
440 pages
ISBN:9781450342698
DOI:10.1145/2906388
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]

Sponsors

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 June 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. automatic identification
  2. bar codes
  3. screen/camera links
  4. smart phones
  5. visual codes

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

MobiSys'16
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

MobiSys '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 197 submissions, 16%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)5
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)When VLC Meets Under-Screen CameraProceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3581791.3596855(343-355)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
  • (2022)MobiScanTransactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies10.1002/ett.415133:4Online publication date: 17-Apr-2022
  • (2020)Distance-Dependent Barcodes for Context-Aware Mobile Applications22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3379503.3403534(1-11)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Invisible QR Code Hijacking Using Smart LEDProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33512843:3(1-23)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2019
  • (2019)MegaLightProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33289373:2(1-23)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2019
  • (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
  • (2018)Card-Stunt as a ServiceGetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications10.1145/3191789.319179721:4(16-21)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2018
  • (2017)Card-stunt as a ServiceProceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3081333.3081357(121-135)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2017

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

EPUB

View this article in ePub.

ePub

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media