Video Display Field Communication: Practical Design and Performance Analysis

Abstract

Display field communication (DFC) is a spectral domain-based, unobtrusive display-to-camera (D2C) communication method in which a commercially available digital display serves as the transmitter and an off-the-shelf camera serves as the receiver. The data are transmitted through video and image frame sequences over D2C links in such a way that it do not obstruct the normal viewing experience. In this study, we propose a Video-DFC approach to detect data embedded in running videos. First, we propose the design of a frame packet structure which is used to facilitate encoding input data as a specific frame sequence. Then, we design a color code-based 4-point block pattern, that is inserted into the four vertices of the transmitted image frames. This block pattern enables frame-to-frame synchronization and accurate extraction of the data-embedded region from the received frames. Our proposed Video-DFC approach demonstrates the potential of transmitting a large amount of data and achieving a data transfer by embedding distinct data in each frame of the running video. To evaluate the robustness of Video-DFC, we conducted extensive experiments varying the frame packet structure, input video, and camera resolution. Depending on the frame packet structure, the results showed a maximum achievable data rate of $\mathrm {27~kbps}$ . Overall, our findings suggest that Video-DFC has the potential to be a next-generation, high-capacity D2C communication method.

Keywords

• Display field communication (DFC)
• display-to-camera (D2C) communication
• frame synchronization
• invisible message
• video signal processing