학술논문

Symbol Position Recovery for Optical Camera Communication With High-Density Matrix Codes
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on. 33(7):3071-3086 Jul, 2023
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Codes
Symbols
Cameras
QR codes
Lenses
Smart phones
Image edge detection
Optical camera communication
2D barcode
matrix code
symbol timing recovery
lens distortion
Language
ISSN
1051-8215
1558-2205
Abstract
Optical transmission of barcodes using handheld cameras offers a practical solution for transmitting small amounts of data without device pairing. In various application scenarios, 2D matrix codes such as QR Code and Data Matrix have become ubiquitous for broadcasting short information such as web links. In recent years, both the increasing demand for higher data throughput and the rapid development of on-board cameras in smartphones have driven research into high-capacity systems. While the reduction of 2D symbol size can quadratically increase the spatial data capacity, accurate localization of small symbols, each consisting of only a few pixels, is extremely difficult due to the non-idealities of the camera-based optical channel. As a result, the data throughput achieved by state-of-the-art systems employing pattern-based methods is still far from optimal. In this work, we propose, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, a novel patternless approach to symbol position recovery for high-density matrix codes. We adapt the even-law synchronizer to estimate the symbol positions in each spatial dimension separately, and compensate for the impact of lens distortion by a successive curve fitting process. Simulation and experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms pattern-based benchmark methods by providing excellent accuracy and reliability.