One tag, two codes: identifying optical barcodes with NFC

Abstract

Barcodes and NFC have become the de facto standards in the field of automatic identification and data capture. These standards have been widely adopted for many applications, such as mobile payments, advertisements, social sharing, admission control, and so on. Recently, considerable demands require the integration of these two codes (barcode and NFC code) into a single tag for the functional complementation. To achieve the goal of "one tag, two codes" (OTTC), this work proposes CoilCode, which takes advantage of the printed electronics to fuse an NFC coil antenna into a QR code on a single layer. The proposed code could be identified by cameras and NFC readers. With the use of the conductive inks, QR code and NFC code have become an essential part of each other: the modules of the QR code facilitate the NFC chip in harvesting energy from the magnetic field, while the NFC antenna itself represents bits of the QR code. Compared to the prior dual-layer OTTC, CoilCode is more compact, cost-effective, flimsy, flexible, and environment-friendly, and also reduces the fabrication complexity considerably. We prototyped hundreds of CoilCodes and conducted comprehensive evaluations (across 4 models of NFC chips and 8 kinds of NFC readers under 13 different system configurations). CoilCode demonstrates high-quality identification results for QR code and NFC functions on a wide range of inputs and under different distortion effects.