DeepLight: Robust and unobtrusive real-time screen-camera communication for real-world displays

The paper introduces a novel, holistic approach for robust Screen-Camera Communication (SCC), where video content on a screen is visually encoded in a human-imperceptible fashion and decoded by a camera capturing images of such screen content. We first show that state-of-the-art SCC techniques have...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: TRAN, Vu Huy, JAYATILAKA, Gihan, ASHOK, Ashwin, MISRA, Archan
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5966
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6969/viewcontent/3412382.3458269.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:The paper introduces a novel, holistic approach for robust Screen-Camera Communication (SCC), where video content on a screen is visually encoded in a human-imperceptible fashion and decoded by a camera capturing images of such screen content. We first show that state-of-the-art SCC techniques have two key limitations for in-the-wild deployment: (a) the decoding accuracy drops rapidly under even modest screen extraction errors from the captured images, and (b) they generate perceptible flickers on common refresh rate screens even with minimal modulation of pixel intensity. To overcome these challenges, we introduce DeepLight, a system that incorporates machine learning (ML) models in the decoding pipeline to achieve humanly-imperceptible, moderately high SCC rates under diverse real-world conditions. DeepLight's key innovation is the design of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based decoder that collectively decodes all the bits spatially encoded in a display frame, without attempting to precisely isolate the pixels associated with each encoded bit. In addition, DeepLight supports imperceptible encoding by selectively modulating the intensity of only the Blue channel, and provides reasonably accurate screen extraction (IoU values ≥ 83%) by using state-of-the-art object detection DNN pipelines. We show that a fully functional DeepLight system is able to robustly achieve high decoding accuracy (frame error rate < 0.2) and moderately-high data goodput (≥0.95 Kbps) using a human-held smartphone camera, even over larger screen-camera distances (~ 2m).