Sizhuo Ma
ABSTRACT
Visual codes such as QR codes provide a low-cost and convenient communication channel between physical objects and mobile devices, but typically operate when the code and the device are in close physical proximity. We propose a system, called QfaR, which enables mobile devices to scan visual codes across long distances even where the image resolution of the visual codes is extremely low. QfaR is based on location-guided code scanning, where we utilize a crowd-sourced database of physical locations of codes. Our key observation is that if the approximate location of the codes and the user is known, the space of possible codes can be dramatically pruned down. Then, even if every "single bit" from the low-resolution code cannot be recovered, QfaR can still identify the visual code from the pruned list with high probability. By applying computer vision techniques, QfaR is also robust against challenging imaging conditions, such as tilt, motion blur, etc. Experimental results with common iOS and Android devices show that QfaR can significantly enhance distances at which codes can be scanned, e.g., 3.6cm-sized codes can be scanned at a distance of 7.5 meters, and 0.5m-sized codes at about 100 meters. QfaR has many potential applications, and beyond our diverse experiments, we also conduct a simple case study on its use for efficiently scanning QR code-based badges to estimate event attendance.
- Pranav Adarsh, Pratibha Rathi, and Manoj Kumar. 2020. YOLO V3-Tiny: Object Detection and Recognition Using One Stage Improved Model. In International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS). IEEE, Coimbatore, India, 687--694.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Eric P Batterman and Donald G Chandler. 1992. Multiple Resolution Machine Readable Symbols. US Patent 5,153,418.Google Scholar
- G. Bradski. 2000. The OpenCV Library. Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools (2000).Google Scholar
- Roberto Brunelli. 2009. Template Matching Techniques in Computer Vision: Theory and Practice. Wiley Publishing.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ronald Steven Cok. 2013. Multi-Resolution Optical Codes. US Patent 8,439,275.Google Scholar
- Michael F Deering. 1998. The Limits of Human Vision. In 2nd International Immersive Projection Technology Workshop, Vol. 2.Google Scholar
- M.D. Grossberg and S.K. Nayar. 2004. Modeling the Space of Camera Response Functions. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 26, 10 (Oct. 2004), 1272--1282.Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. Guruswami. 2003. List Decoding with Side Information. In IEEE Annual Conference on Computational Complexity. IEEE Comput. Soc, Aarhus, Denmark, 300--309.Google Scholar
- V. Guruswami and M. Sudan. 1998. Improved Decoding of Reed-Solomon and Algebraic-Geometric Codes. In Proceedings 39th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. IEEE Comput. Soc, Palo Alto, CA, USA, 28--37.Google Scholar
- Frederik Hermans, Liam McNamara, Gábor Sörös, Christian Rohner, Thiemo Voigt, and Edith Ngai. 2016. FOCUS: Robust Visual Codes for Everyone. In Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys). ACM Press, Singapore, Singapore, 319--332.Google Scholar
- Wenjun Hu, Jingshu Mao, Zihui Huang, Yiqing Xue, Junfeng She, Kaigui Bian, and Guobin Shen. 2014. Strata: Layered Coding for Scalable Visual Communication. In Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom). ACM Press, Maui, Hawaii, USA, 79--90.Google Scholar
- Qingfeng Huang, James E Reich, Marc E Mosko, and Victoria ME Bellotti. 2014. Using Multi-Resolution Visual Codes to Facilitate Information Browsing in the Physical World. US Patent 8,849,943.Google Scholar
- Rachel Huang, Jonathan Pedoeem, and Cuixian Chen. 2018. YOLO-LITE: A Real-Time Object Detection Algorithm Optimized for Non-GPU Computers. In IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). IEEE, Seattle, WA, USA, 2503--2510.Google Scholar
- Renchao Jin, Shengrong Zhao, Xiangyang Xu, Enmin Song, and Chih-Cheng Hung. 2016. Super-Resolving Barcode Images with an Edge-Preserving Variational Bayesian Framework. Journal of Electronic Imaging 25, 3 (June 2016), 033016.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yuji Kato, Daisuke Deguchi, Tomokazu Takahashi, Ichiro Ide, and Hiroshi Murase. 2011. Low Resolution QR-Code Recognition by Applying Super-Resolution Using the Property of QR-Codes. In International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR). IEEE, Beijing, China, 992--996.Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Koetter and A. Vardy. 2003. Algebraic Soft-Decision Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 49, 11 (Nov. 2003), 2809--2825.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wei Liu, Dragomir Anguelov, Dumitru Erhan, Christian Szegedy, Scott Reed, Cheng-Yang Fu, and Alexander C. Berg. 2016. SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV). 21--37. arXiv:1512.02325Google Scholar
- J. Massey. 1969. Shift-Register Synthesis and BCH Decoding. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 15, 1 (Jan. 1969), 122--127.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Krista Merry and Pete Bettinger. 2019. Smartphone GPS Accuracy Study in an Urban Environment. PLOS ONE 14, 7 (July 2019), e0219890.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shree K Nayar, Jian Wang, and Wenzheng Chen. 2022. Long Distance QR Code Decoding. US Patent 11,461,924.Google Scholar
- Samuel David Perli, Nabeel Ahmed, and Dina Katabi. 2010. PixNet: Interference-Free Wireless Links Using LCD-camera Pairs. In Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobi-Com). ACM Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 137.Google Scholar
- Joseph Redmon and Ali Farhadi. 2018. YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement. arXiv:1804.02767 [cs] (April 2018). arXiv:1804.02767 [cs]Google Scholar
- I. S. Reed and G. Solomon. 1960. Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields. J. Soc. Indust. Appl. Math. 8, 2 (June 1960), 300--304.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Steven J Simske, Guy Adams, and Jason S Aronoff. 2010. Multiple Resolution Readable Color Array. US Patent 7,673,807.Google Scholar
- WeChat. 2021. WeChat QR code detector for detecting and parsing QR code. https://github.com/opencv/opencv_contrib/tree/4.x/modules/wechat_qrcode.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- QfaR: Location-Guided Scanning of Visual Codes from Long Distances
Recommendations
Analyzing the Use of Quick Response Codes in the Wild
MobiSys '15: Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and ServicesOne- and two-dimensional barcodes, including Quick Response (QR) codes, have become a convenient way to communicate small amounts of information from physical objects to mobile devices. While there is much discussion, awareness, and proposed use of such ...
Ninja Codes: Exploring Neural Generationof Discreet Visual Codes
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsIn this paper we report the results of our early explorations regarding Ninja Codes, a new class of visual codes intended to be used in a variety of interactive applications including augmented reality, motion/gesture control, contactless data transfer, ...
Light Codes for Fast Two-Way Human-Centric Visual Communication
Visual codes, such as QR codes, are widely used in several applications for conveying information to users. However, user interactions based on spatial codes (e.g., displaying codes on phone screens for exchanging contact information) are often tedious, ...
Comments