Design and Experimental Characterization of a Discovery and Tracking System for Optical Camera Communications

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) technology is emerging as a candidate to meet the demand for interconnected devices’ communications. However, the costs of incorporating specific hardware into end-user devices slow down its market entry. Optical camera communication (OCC) technology paves the way by reusing cameras as receivers. These systems have generally been evaluated under static conditions, in which transmitting sources are recognized using computationally expensive discovery algorithms. In vehicle-to-vehicle networks and wearable devices, tracking algorithms, as proposed in this work, allow one to reduce the time required to locate a moving source and hence the latency of these systems, increasing the data rate by up to 2100%. The proposed receiver architecture combines discovery and tracking algorithms that analyze spatial features of a custom RGB LED transmitter matrix, highlighted in the scene by varying the cameras’ exposure time. By using an anchor LED and changing the intensity of the green LED, the receiver can track the light source with a slow temporal deterioration. Moreover, data bits sent over the red and blue channels do not significantly affect detection, hence transmission occurs uninterrupted. Finally, a novel experimental methodology to evaluate the evolution of the detection’s performance is proposed. With the analysis of the mean and standard deviation of novel K parameters, it is possible to evaluate the detected region-of-interest scale and centrality against the transmitter source’s ideal location.

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“…Additionally, working with communication frames instead of a few identifiers would significantly increase the computational and temporal costs of the algorithm. In [15], dependence on transmitter shape and size would also restrict its use in dense sensor networks. Finally, ref.…”

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“…An artificial neural networkbased equalizer is proposed and experimentally evaluated for the constant power 4-level pulse amplitude modulation, demonstrating improvement in the OCC system performance. A. Mederos-Barrera et al [15], in the paper on "Design and Experimental Characterization of a Discovery and Tracking System for Optical Camera Communications", focus on the real-time detection of the source within the image. The proposed receiver architecture combines discovery and tracking algorithms that analyze spatial features of a custom RGB LED transmitter matrix, highlighted in the scene by varying the cameras' exposure time.…”