MAMBA: Adaptive and Bi-directional Data Transfer for Reliable Camera-display Communication

Camera-display communication leverages visible light to transfer data wirelessly by using a screen as a transmitter and a camera as a receiver. Such an approach faces several challenges to be employed in practice, including unreliable decoding due to imperfect synchronization and channel impairments. This article introduces MAMBA, a mobile application framework for adaptive camera-display communication with color barcodes. MAMBA employs efficient computer vision techniques and scales with the number of blocks in the barcode, rather than with the number of pixels in the captured image. As a consequence, it allows to take full advantage from the high-resolution cameras available on modern mobile devices. In addition, MAMBA realizes an adaptive and bi-directional protocol for camera-display communication with fast feedback. Specifically, MAMBA carries out dynamic adaptation of both frame rate and length based on environmental conditions and the processing capabilities of the devices. Experimental results show that MAMBA is effective, thereby allowing reliable realtime communication in a variety of operating conditions.