RescQR: Enabling Reliable Data Recovery in Screen-Camera Communication System

Abstract

With an increasing number of mobile devices equipped with screens and cameras, screen-camera communication (SCC) systems enable data exchange between devices conveniently and efficiently. By encoding data with spatial and temporal diversity on a screen, multiple users with a camera can receive data without setting up a wireless network. However, as the transmitter pushes the limits of increasing throughput with a high display rate, the receiver actually suffers from a low goodput caused by composite frames. Those frames cannot be decoded correctly with existing methods. To address this problem, we propose a reliable data recovery scheme named RescQR. In RescQR, a mixture separation scheme coupled with a dedicated frame border is proposed to separate composite frames. A Viterbi-based data recovery scheme is proposed to recover data from blurred regions in composite frames. Additionally, an auto-configuration method with the help of a front camera is proposed to adjust parameters automatically according to the estimated distance between the screen and the camera. Our prototype and experiments demonstrate that RescQR achieves a data goodput of 400+kbps even with standard QR codes, which significantly outperforms previous solutions.