2014 Reports

DisCo: Displays that Communicate

Jo, Kensei; Gupta, Mohit; Nayar, Shree K.

We present DisCo, a novel display-camera communication system that enables displays to send short messages to digital sensors, while simultaneously displaying images for human consumption. Existing display-camera communication methods are largely based on spatial-domain steganography, where the information is encoded as an imperceptible spatial signal (e.g., QR-code). These methods, while simple to implement, are prone to errors due to common causes of image degradations such as occlusions, display being outside the sensor’s field-of-view, defocus blur and perspective distortion. Due to these limitations, steganography based techniques have not been widely adopted, specially in uncontrolled settings involving consumer cameras and public displays.