VLIP: Tightly Coupled Visible-Light/Inertial Positioning System to Cope With Intermittent Outage

Recently, it is believed that visible light communication (VLC) will take the lead in the future indoor communication system as the popularization of high power LEDs. By taking advantage of VLC, many vision-based visible light positioning (VLP) algorithms emerge and achieve high accuracy. However, most of them require at least four visible LEDs, and therefore will not work when there are insufficient LEDs. This is what we called intermittent outage for a vision-based VLP system. To solve this problem, we fuse the inertial measurement unit and VLC information in a tightly coupled scheme so that the VLP system is able to continually provide location service under the aforementioned intermittent outage condition. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases the utilization percentage of image frames from 51.4% to 100.0% in the same dataset.