{"id":776,"date":"2022-01-14T10:08:45","date_gmt":"2022-01-14T10:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/?p=776"},"modified":"2023-05-04T20:15:03","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T20:15:03","slug":"transmitting-images-via-bluetooth-le","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/transmitting-images-via-bluetooth-le\/","title":{"rendered":"Transmitting Images via Bluetooth LE?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some platform providers claim beacons can transmit multimedia data which isn’t strictly true. A beacon sends a small amount of data that typically contains a unique id. When an app sees an id it shows information, such as an image, that is typically obtained from a server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about beacons actually <\/strong>transmitting images? Chong Shao, Shahriar Nirjon, Jan-Michael Frahm or the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina has a paper on “Years-Long Binary Image Broadcast using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons” (pdf<\/a>). Again, don’t be misled, they don’t mean it takes years to send an image but instead that a beacon might transmit for a long time (which most do).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers have found that with suitable compression schemes, a set of 2\u20133 beacons is capable of broadcasting high-quality images (75%\u201390% structurally similar to original images). The image quality improves when more beacons are used.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"beaconimageprocessingpipeline\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

How might you get the data into a beacon? Well, some beacons such as the M52 Plus<\/a> and iB003N allow arbitrary data to be set in the advertising data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The images are necessarily very simple but nevertheless this provides a great example of what can be achieved when you attempt the seemingly impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some platform providers claim beacons can transmit multimedia data which isn’t strictly true. A beacon sends a small amount of data that typically contains a unique id. When an app sees an id it shows information, such as an image, that is typically obtained from a server. But what about beacons actually transmitting images? Chong … Continue reading “Transmitting Images via Bluetooth LE?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,65],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8616,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/8616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}