Vehicular Visible Light Communication with Dynamic Vision Sensor: A Preliminary Study

State-of-the-art vehicular visible light communication (V2LC) systems utilize either a photodiode or a camera as the receiver, while both have their drawbacks. A photodiode-based receiver lacks the capability to separate signals from sources transmitting at the same time and is more vulnerable to interference. On the other hand, a camera-based receiver suffers from low system throughput, resulting from the low image frame rate of commodity cameras. In this paper, we investigate a solution which attempts to combine the best of both, and mitigate their drawbacks.We propose to use a new type of CMOS vision sensor: a dynamic vision sensor (DVS). Instead of recording still frames, a DVS only generates outputs when it senses a significant change of brightness in a pixel. The output of a DVS is a stream of events on the pixel basis with 1 μs resolution, which greatly increase the bandwidth. We investigate the key requirements of the modulation wave form when using a DVS camera-based receiver, and propose a new pulse wave form that maintains the same average luminance level while extending the operational range of the system. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed wave form nearly triples the range to 8 m, compared to the range of 3 m when using the conventional inverse pulse position modulation wave form.