CORE-lens: simultaneous communication and object recognition with disentangled-GAN cameras

Optical camera communication (OCC) enabled by LED and embedded cameras has attracted extensive attention, thanks to its rich spectrum availability and ready deployability. However, the close interactions between OCC and the indoor spaces have created two major challenges. On one hand, the stripe pattern incurred by OCC may greatly damage the accuracy of image-based object recognition. On the other hand, the patterns inherent to indoor spaces can significantly degrade the decoding performance of reflected OCC. To this end, we propose CORE-Lens as a pipeline to make the mutual interference transparent to existing OR and OCC algorithms. Essentially, CORE-Lens treats the two challenges as two sides of a signal mixture issue: the signals transmitted by OCC get mixed with background images so well that their features become entangled. Consequently, CORE-Lens exploits the idea of disentangled representation learning to separate the mixed signals in the feature space: while the GAN-reconstructed clean background images are used to perform object recognition, OCC decoding is conducted on the residual of the original image after subtracting the reconstructed background. Our extensive experiments on evaluating the real-life performance of CORE-Lens evidently demonstrate its superiority over conventional approaches.