Balloon Tag: (in)visible marker which tells who's who

Abstract

This paper introduces the Balloon Tag, an infrared LED tag whose ID is detected and read by an ordinary video camera. Different from conventional visual tag systems, signal patterns cannot be seen by human eyes and don't annoy the user while the relative position of the tag from the camera can be recognized as the barcode ID tag. The authors combined the idea of the Balloon Tag with wireless communication over Bluetooth which would become widely used with wearable computers. With the proposed algorithm, the Balloon Tag receiver chooses the nearest Bluetooth transmitter. Then, a part of the Bluetooth device address (BD ADDR) is obtained to make a connection. As a result, the receiver can easily select the most important person to communicate with.