Characterization and Performance of a Thermal Camera Communication System

Abstract

This work presents a novel communications technology named Thermal Camera Communication (TCC), which is analogous to Optical Camera Communication (OCC). Thermographic cameras and Peltier cells are proposed as receiver and transmitter, respectively, changing completely their usual field of application. Furthermore, a comprehensive characterization of the Peltier–Thermal camera pair is carried out, presenting their bandwidth, achievable data rate under On-Off-Keying (OOK) modulation, noise characteristics, and energy efficiency. A comparison against the current state-of-the-art OCC technology is also provided, showing that TCC is a promising technology suitable for sensor networks. The thorough analysis of TCC performed in this work shows that commercial Peltier cells can be re-thought under a communications viewpoint in order to improve their performance. This novel communication technology can be applied in environments such as the access to public transportation or buildings due to the new health emergency situation. The use of thermographic cameras will become massive and dual measurement and communication purposes could be considered for applications such as sensor networks, using a yet unexploited wavelength range.

Harvesting Planck radiation for free-space optical communications in the long-wave infrared band

“…While previous work generated engineered blackbody radiation from artificial sources to implement secure FSO communications over centimeter scale distances [15], we showed an implementation that currently scales to 28.7 meters, and can scale to kilometers in the future. Even works which used naturally occuring Planck radiation were limited to low-rate analog communications such as Morse code [11,16] while our work demonstrates that this FSO communication system that can be scaled to higher rate digital communications. This technique shows promise for realizing broad spectrum ad-hoc and covert communications channels in the LWIR and the development of communications transmitters that can achieve small size, weight and power by harvesting naturally occuring energy for communications symbol generation.…”

Perspective— Powerful Micro/Nano-Scale Heat Engine: Thermoelectric Converter on Chip

“…Interestingly, the input currentinduced surface temperature change of the thermoelectric device is accompanied by a change in the infrared emissivity, which enables its communication with the observer and may be applied to some special scenarios. 21 When a thermoelectric converter acts as a sensor, the heat of the detected target acts as the signal source (such as a temperature sensor). 4 The detection of various signals can be achieved by converting other signals into heat, such as optical sensor (light intensity and light wavelength or even terahertz, etc.…”

Wireless Sensor Networks Using Sub-Pixel Optical Camera Communications: Advances in Experimental Channel Evaluation

“…Therefore, it is convenient to carry out a unit conversion that takes into account this particularity. The number of stored electrons ( ) during the exposure time of the capture (valid for any situation) is obtained by [ 41 ]: …”