TERA: Screen-to-Camera Image Code With Transparency, Efficiency, Robustness and Adaptability

With the rapid development of digital devices, the issue of how to transmit information among different devices with multimedia carriers has drawn much attention from the research community. This paper focuses on the important user scenario of “screen-to-camera information transmission”. Along this direction, image coding-based techniques have been shown to be the most popular and effective methods in the past decades. However, after careful study, we find that none of the existing methods can satisfy the four important properties simultaneously, i.e., high transparency, high embedding efficiency, strong transmission robustness and high adaptability to device types. This is mainly because these properties are contradictory with each other. In this paper, we thus propose a screen-to-camera image code dubbed “TERA” (transparency, efficiency, robustness and adaptability), which makes it possible to circumvent the contradiction among the above four properties for the first time. Generally, TERA adopts the color decomposition principle to ensure the visual quality and the superposition-based scheme to ensure embedding efficiency. BCH-coding-based information arrangement and a powerful attention-guided information decoding network are further designed to guarantee the robustness and adaptability. Through extensive experiments, the superiority and broad applications of our method are demonstrated.