Positioning Using Visible Light Communications: A Perspective Arcs Approach

Visible light positioning (VLP) is an accurate indoor positioning technology that uses luminaires as transmitters. In particular, circular luminaires are a common source type for VLP, which are typically treated only as point sources for positioning, while ignoring their geometry characteristics. In this paper, the arc feature of the circular luminaire and the coordinate information obtained via visible light communication (VLC) are jointly used for positioning, and a novel perspective arcs approach is proposed for VLC-enabled indoor positioning. The proposed approach does not rely on any inertial measurement unit and has no tilted angle limitation at the user. First, a VLC assisted perspective circle and arc algorithm (V-PCA) is proposed for a scenario in which a complete luminaire and an incomplete one can be captured by the user. Based on plane and solid geometry theory, the relationship between the luminaire and the user is exploited to estimate the orientation and the coordinate of the luminaire in the camera coordinate system. Then, the pose and location of the user in the world coordinate system are obtained by single-view geometry theory. Considering the cases in which parts of VLC links are blocked, an anti-occlusion VLC assisted perspective arcs algorithm (OA-V-PA) is proposed. In OA-V-PA, an approximation method is developed to estimate the projection of the luminaire’s center on the image and, then, to calculate the pose and location of the user. Simulation results show that the proposed indoor positioning algorithm can achieve a 90th percentile positioning accuracy of around 10 cm. Moreover, an experimental prototype is implemented to verify the feasibility. In the established prototype, a fused image processing method is proposed to simultaneously obtain the VLC information and the geometric information. Experimental results in the established prototype show that the average positioning accuracy is less than 5 cm for different tilted angles of the user.