High-speed optical camera communication using selective capture

Abstract

One of the major challenges in optical camera communication (OCC) is low data transmission rate, due to low sampling rate of a camera based receiver, compared with very high-speed modulation of light emitting diodes (LEDs). This paper presents a high-speed OCC using a novel capturing strategy called selective capture (SC). The proposed SC scheme provides a high data rate of up to 10.272 kbps in OCC, when evaluated with a Raspberry Pi camera module (RaspiCam) as the receiver. Experiments were conducted with a 4×4 red, green and blue (RGB) LED array employed as the transmitter and time synchronized based on a keyframe. The RaspiCam was tweaked with the SC values in terms of pixels using the Linux commanding tool. This tweaked RaspiCam facilitates the selection of the resolution and the SC area to selectively capture from the full camera capture frame. Experiment results demonstrate that a capture speed of 435 frames per second (fps) can be achieved, yielding a high-speed indoor OCC with a bit error rate (BER) of 10−5 at a transmission distance of 125 cm.