Screens Talking to Cameras without You Knowing it

Graduate students Tianxing Li, Chuankai An, and Professors Andrew Campbell and Xia Zhou are awarded the Best Paper Award at ACM VLCS'14 for their work on advancing screen-to-camera communication.

We are all familiar with QRCodes: a coded image shown on the screen (e.g., smartphone screens, TVs), which can then be captured by a phone camera and translated into data.

The new system called HiLight removes the need of showing any coded images like QRCode while still enabling data transmissions between screens and cameras. HiLight encodes data into pixel color intensity changes, which human eyes cannot see yet cameras can.

By creating such a hidden communication channel, HiLight opens up new opportunities for smart devices (e.g., smartphones, smart glass) to interact with each other, enabling new interaction design and context-aware applications.

Check out HiLight, other projects and research opportunities in the newly formed DartNets Lab co-directed by Professors Xia Zhou and Andrew Campbell.