Acoustic Barcodes: Passive, Durable and Inexpensive Notched Identification Tags (UIST 2012)

We present acoustic barcodes, structured patterns of physical notches that, when swiped with e.g., a fingernail, produce a complex sound that can be resolved to a binary ID. A single, inexpensive contact microphone attached to a surface or object is used to capture the waveform. We present our method for decoding sounds into IDs, which handles variations in swipe velocity and other factors. Acoustic barcodes could be used for information re