Experimental Evaluation of Display Field Communication Based on Machine Learning and Modem Design

Display field communication (DFC) is a frequency-domain unobtrusive display-to-camera (D2C) communication, in which an electronic display serves as a transmitter and a camera serves as a receiver. In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based DFC scheme and evaluate its performance in a lab test scenario. First of all, we adopt the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to transform a spatial-domain image into its spectral-domain equivalent. To reduce the computational complexity during the data-embedding process, addition allocation and subtraction data retrieval techniques are used. Moreover, channel coding is applied to overcome the data error caused by the optical wireless channel. In particular, robust turbo coding is used for error detection and correction. Afterward, we perform the experiments to validate the performance of the proposed system. After capturing the displayed image with a camera, data restoration is done using a deep learning technique. Extensive real-world experiments were performed considering various geometric distortions, noise, and different standard input images. As a result, we found that by increasing the transmit display image size (upsampling), the overall error rate can be reduced. In addition, real-world noise analysis is performed and it is notified that the actual noise is dominant in the low-frequency region of an image. The experimental results confirm the robust performance of the proposed DFC scheme and show that an error-free performance can be achieved up to a distance of 1 m in the given lab test environment setting.