DeepCCB-OCC: Deep Learning-Driven Complementary Color Barcode-Based Optical Camera Communications

Abstract

Display-to-camera (D2C) communications has emerged as a key method for next-generation videos that offer side information to camera-equipped devices during normal viewing. This paper presents Deep learning-driven Complementary Color Barcode-based Optical Camera Communications (DeepCCB-OCC), a D2C system using multiple deep neural networks built for imperceptible transmission and reliable communication in a D2C link. DeepCCB-OCC takes advantage of a the You Only Look Once (YOLO) model to provide seamless detection of a color barcode area in electronic displays. To identify transmitted color barcode symbols in the received image, we define various color barcode patterns caused by the synchronization jitter between the camera and the display. Then, DeepCCB-OCC incorporates convolutional neural network (CNN) models to accurately detect the pilot and data symbols in the transmission packets, regardless of the various D2C environments. Experiments with a commercial monitor and a smartphone demonstrate that DeepCCB-OCC outperforms the conventional CCB-OCC system from various distances and angles of a D2C link. The experiment results prove that, when the alignment angle was 20 degrees at a distance of 90 cm between the display and the camera, the proposed scheme achieved approximately 79.1 bps, which showed a performance improvement of 14.1% compared to the existing technique.